Entertainment
Hollywood writers have a word for it: Inequality.
The fundamental issues of labor disputes doesn’t change much. Here in 2023, as in the past, they hit familiar notes: fair pay, respect in the workplace, pushback against companies determined to snatch droplets of extra profits and drive up stock prices by oversizing work required of workers.
These principles have been the basis of protests by nurses and healthcare workers for the past two years alone, as COVID has exposed hospitals to severe shortages of staff and equipment. They describe the ongoing struggle of California service industry workers in restaurants, hotels and convention centers for decent wages and safe working conditions.
And they are behind the latest labor action, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike that began May 2nd.
So what’s different this time around?
Alas: it is Hollywood itself.
The Writers Guild of America says that over the past decade, the median weekly salary of writer-producers has fallen by 4%.
There aren’t many times when adding the word Hollywood to a sentence makes it worse, but this is one of them. It distracts from the writers’ action by placing the dispute in a fantasy factory, the miniverse in which movies, television, and streaming shows are produced and sent out into the world.
A Hollywood strike doesn’t seem real or, if real, it doesn’t seem urgent. But it is a legitimate action, intended to draw attention to legitimate labor issues. And when you remove the patina from the industry itself, these problems are quite common: workers are paid less and are asked to do more, while their employers make huge profits but decide that these are not enough.
There’s nothing flashy about it. As any writer would tell you, this isn’t even a new story.
* * *
The day the strike started, the WGA released a detailed list of his proposals for a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The AMPTP is the vast consortium of film and television studios and includes industry powerhouses like Paramount, Sony, Universal and Disney, all networks and the rising forces of the business: streaming services led by Netflix , Amazon and Apple TV+.
The WGA listing made it clear how far apart the parties were in negotiations, and nothing has changed in the week-plus since writers began picketing. According to the unions’ accounts, his proposals would net writers about $429 million a year, while the AMPTP proposals would net $86 million a year. It’s quite a chasm.
More important, however, is what’s in the small details. Nearly half of the increase suggested by the AMPTP simply takes the form of an increase in minimum wage, the minimum that studios can be expected to pay. It’s important because the studios pay the minimum to a higher percentage writers than at any other time in recent history.
The WGA reports that over the past decade, the median weekly salary for writer-producers has declined by 4%. Taking inflation into account, the reduction is 23%.
This is not a Hollywood speech. It’s common to workers in a multitude of industries, and it’s the result of a fairly generic tactic: companies try to move as many workers as possible to the lowest wages possible. While the gross dollars involved may be higher in TV/Film than in other industries, so is the cost of living; the median list price for a house in Los Angeles, where most writers must live, was $1.1 million in April, according to Realtor.com.
The vote in favor of the strike was 98%, and the net effect was to cripple the fancy factory.
There are other issues that, although hidden in show business jargon, are old in nature. Where writers’ rooms of six to 12 writers are traditionally staffed to produce a network show for a season, streaming services are increasingly using mini rooms of just a few writers, who are often guests. sketching or finishing a season worth of episodes for a show that hasn’t even been picked up yet. It’s complete teamwork.
The explosion in the use of mini-theaters over the past decade worries screenwriters, as does the fact that most streaming series have eight or ten episodes per season, or a few months of work, compared to 20 to 24 for network shows, which are usually 10-month assignments. This, too, is important in a business where a writer may spend long stretches between months or years on the show.
And the WGA’s request to set limits on the use of AI in the creative process to ban AI-generated primary scripts, for example, was met with stony silence from the industry. industry, a chilling suggestion that studios have no interest in regulating their ability to, potentially, completely replace workers.
In summary: writers are losing ground financially; corporations try to get them to do more work for less money; employers don’t want to talk about the future of work.
It is a universal language of work.
* * *
Several factors make the the writers’ strike seems different from other actions for employment. The first, of course, is that writers don’t trade 40 hours a week. The very nature of their business is cyclical work in unpredictable quantities, one of the reasons the union has fought so hard in previous collective agreements for, among other things, easier to obtain health care benefits.
Another factor is scale. While the WGA’s proposed $429 million gain seems like a lot, it should be noted that, by the unions detailed accountingindustry profits are between $28 billion and $30 billion every year from 2017-2021. Netflix, the industry-designated disruptor due to its streaming success, led the way, reporting $6 billion in profits in 2021 alone.
But perhaps the biggest difference in this Hollywood story is the union itself. The WGA is not only powerful, with a membership that includes virtually every active writer in the industry, it is cohesive. The strike vote was 98%, and the net effect was to cripple the fantasy factory: no scripts, no rewrites, no productions. Late-night talk shows, so reliant on writers’ rooms for their monologues and segments, died out immediately.
Hollywood studios have always looked down on their content creators, one of the reasons unionization among writers in the industry dates back more than a century.
While it may work against type, Hollywood is a union town. Almost all jobs, from manager to electrician to food service worker, are union jobs. And the AMPTP faces two important upcoming negotiations beyond writers: the Directors Guild of America, starting this week, and SAG-AFTRA (which represents performers) later this summer. He has no choice but to deal with the WGA, sooner if not later.
Studios have always looked down on their content creators, one reason unionization among writers in the industry is going up more than a century. As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Irving Thalberg, who helped establish MGM Studios and became its chief producer at the age of 26 in 1925, said once, What is it about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.
In truth, writers are the source of most of what studios produce. Here in 2023, they are also well-organized workers, part of a union that went on strike eight times since the 1950s to obtain fair wages and conditions.
In this regard, they have significant common ground with nurses, hospitality workers, food service workers and others, and their ability to strike a fair deal with massive, results-driven corporations must be closely monitored. The Hollywood sign, after all, is just a sign. This is collective bargaining.
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