For the first time in 15 years, Hollywood’s writers are on strike.
This comes after negotiations failed between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). An overwhelming percentage of guild members — 97.85% of over 11,500 film and TV writers, those responsible for the media we know and love here at A Little Bit Human — voted to strike.
The strike began at precisely 12:01 am on Tuesday, a minute after WGA’s contract with the AMPTP expired — just a day after International Workers’ Day. The stakes are high: An estimated 822,000 jobs are directly on the line, with 2.4 million total jobs supported.
Firstly, What is the WGA?
The Writer’s Guild of America is composed of two different labor unions: The Writers Guild of America East (WGAE), based in New York City, and The Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), headquartered in Los Angeles.
Together, the two unions represent writers in film, TV, radio, and online media (but not newspaper writers and reality writers, who are represented by a different union). Though they operate separately, they work together when negotiating contracts with the AMPTP, which represents major motion picture studios like Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros; streaming services like Netflix, Apple TV+, and Amazon; and television networks like ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC.
When these negotiations fail, WGAE and WGAW organize strikes in unison.
Why Writers Are Striking
A big reason behind the strike is the fact that writers are simply not being compensated enough for their work, despite it being the foundation of every successful TV show or film. Some of the WGA’s demands include higher minimum compensation, addressing the abuse of “mini rooms,” and better regulations with regard to AI.
Fair Compensation and Residuals
The WGA report Writers Are Not Keeping Up, released just last March, outlined how writers’ salaries have decreased a staggering 14% over the last five years amidst the shift to streaming services.
Worryingly, it highlights how more and more TV and film writers are working for minimum pay regardless of experience, often for shorter contracts. For instance, 10 years ago, 33% of all TV series writers were paid minimum wage. Today, nearly half of all TV writers, including seasoned ones and even showrunners, are working union minimum wage.
Moreover, the median weekly pay for writers and producers has declined 4% over the past decade — a number that looks worse when adjusted for inflation, at 23%.
The report concludes that companies have used the transition towards streaming to underpay their writers and create precarious models for writing work.
Courtesy of the WGA Social Media Tool Kit.
Thus, the WGA’s demands include increasing minimum compensation significantly to address the devaluation of writing in all areas of television, new media, and features, as well as ensuring appropriate television series writing compensation throughout the entire process of pre-production, production, and post-production.
The WGA has also demanded the “increase of residuals for under-compensated reuse markets.”
For the unfamiliar, residuals work kind of like royalties for writers. They are compensation paid when a show or movie is reused. However, residuals have decreased significantly in the transition to streaming due to contractual loopholes.
For every year the show is available to stream, the residuals decrease. That is to say, if the show stays on the platform’s library in the first place, which increasingly isn’t the case as companies realize they can simply not pay writers — as well as actors, directors, and everybody else that worked on a show — if they pulled their own shows out of their roster.
In September last year, Kyra Jones, who’s worked on shows like Queens (2021) and Woke (2020), tweeted:
But those 4 whole dollars seem like a luxury compared to the residuals check Valentina Garza, a producer, and writer for Only Murders in the Building (2021) and Jane the Virgin (2014), shared just this May:
The Mini-room problem
The WGA is also looking to address TV’s “mini-room” problem.
Mini-rooms are the result of companies shrinking typical writers’ rooms and hiring writers for shorter terms and less money. The WGA describes this as part of the AMPTP’s efforts to create a gig economy out of jobs that used to be full-time careers, citing companies’ refusal to guarantee weekly employment and their creation of “day rates” in comedy shows.
Regulations Regarding AI
Among the list of demands were regulations on the use of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly with regard to AI-generated scripts or reworked material that would put writers out of work.
In a Deadline picket-line interview, WGA negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser shared that the AMPTP simply did not want to discuss AI.
He said, “I think you get a really good sense from the companies about where they see the future based on what they say they won’t talk about. Because the stuff they’ll say yes to is the stuff they feel like they can absorb so easily, or maybe not pay in the long run.”
A Broken Industry
Overall, Keyser explains that demands aren’t too much at all, as fair compensation is something that writers have had before. He describes the strike as writers’ attempt to maintain a livable career, which is absolutely reasonable.
“These costs are absorbable into film and movie budgets, by and large. They’re small compared to these overall budgets,” he said. “I think we are arguing to keep a system going that’s worked really well for decades… where we write the stuff that makes them millions, and we’re allowed to earn a living that permits us to stay in this business.”
In a statement released late Monday night, the WGA wrote:
“Here is what all writers know: the companies have broken this business. They have taken so much from the very people, the writers, who have made them wealthy. But what they cannot take from us is each other, our solidarity, our mutual commitment to save ourselves and this profession that we love. We had hoped to do this through reasonable conversation. Now we will do it through struggle. For the sake of our present and our future, we have been given no other choice.”
What the Strike Means for TV and Film
The strike comes in the wake of COVID-19’s continuing economic impact and massive layoffs in Hollywood.
Based on the last strike in 2007, we know that most television shows today will stop production — a consequence that affects thousands of actors, directors, and crew members. Those that will continue production are likely to drop in quality, going the way of Heroes and Friday Night Lights.
Late-night shows are the first to feel the effects of the strike. In both the 2007 strike and the current one, late-night shows began airing reruns on the very first night.
But for late-night show staff, there are some silver linings: NBC and the hosts of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers have pledged to pay writers despite the shows going dark. NBC is paying its writers until the end of next week, and the hosts, both members of the WGA, will be paying their crews through the third week of the strike. Staff at both shows will also have their healthcare extended through September.
Soap operas are likely the next to be affected, given their fast turnaround times. The timing of the strike also means that production for new programming set for the 2023-2024 network season would be affected.
Though some studios already have content banked in anticipation of the strike — they have, apparently, been bracing for it since at least February — most shows aren’t exempt from its effects.
For instance, HBO’s House of the Dragon is set to go ahead with production using finished scripts, but anyone who’s worked in production would know that a script is never finished until the final edit of an episode. Writers are a crucial part of shooting, too, as rewrites and adjustments happen on set all the time — to make those changes during the strike constitutes scabbing.
Meanwhile, movies are less likely to be affected in the short term, given their long production cycles.
Depending on how long the strike lasts, it would cost Hollywood billions of dollars. The previous strike, which lasted 100 days from November 2007 to February 2008, cost $2.1 billion in economic damage. Adjusting for inflation, that’s around $3 billion today.
It’s also worth noting that other labor unions have expressed support for the WGA, including the Producers Guild of America and IATSE Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild. On Wednesday night, the WGA held a massive solidarity rally with other members of the entertainment industry.
Celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Drew Barrymore, John Mulaney, and The Sopranos’ Edie Falco have also stood with the striking writers.
What Now?
There’s no telling how long the strike will last.
But the best case scenario, according to Keyser, is that a reasonable deal will be made soon. “Not everything we asked for,” he said, “But enough to protect writers and make this a viable profession going forward in all sectors of the business.”