David Dayen
Striking Writers Guild of America members on the picket line, May 4, 2023, in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES – It takes a special kind of luck—bad—to get caught in the rain in Southern California in May, but dozens of writers outside the Fox lot last week managed the feat. So did I, and somehow, the last couple of picket lines I’d covered in L.A., for teachers and school worker strikes, were similarly rain-soaked. I think harnessing the energy of labor action can finally end the mega-drought.
It was the third day of picketing in the first Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike since 2007. At that time, there were hints of the new world in which writers were finding themselves: the shift away from broadcast and cable television and toward online streaming, but it wasn’t fully defined. A month after the 2007 strike ended, a consortium of studios launched Hulu as a public product, and the streaming era was off to the races.
Writers today say they are fighting for their very survival, and so far, other Hollywood unions are squarely behind them. In an industry that hasn’t always seen a high level of solidarity, that support is crucial, with two other unions about to enter negotiations with the studios, which bargain under the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Because the core issues aren’t merely minimum pay or conditions, but the very structure of how writers are hired and compensated, the strike, which began May 2, has the potential to be protracted. (The 2007 strike lasted 100 days; others have lasted even longer.) The AMPTP will no doubt try to pit the various guilds against one another. The outcome could hinge on whether or not the unions let that happen.
THE DECADE AND A HALF SINCE THE LAST WGA STRIKE has completely upended the entertainment business, and writers have felt a particularly deep impact. Streaming companies, not bound by rules or custom when it came to writers’ rooms, have changed the model to look less like the romantic vision of writers engaged in the collaborative process and more like Uber and Lyft.
“They only hire us when they need us, and they only keep us around for as long as they want us, and then they go off and profit off our backs, assuming we’re fungible,” said Patric Verrone, a longtime TV comedy writer (The Critic, The Simpsons, Futurama) and past president of the WGA West, including during the last strike.
Many writers’ rooms, especially on streaming, have shrunk, and there’s been a rise in “mini-rooms,” where the showrunner (the lead creator/executive producer on a series) just gets a couple of writers to round out the season. “The rooms are so short, there’s no one left to support the showrunner,” said Amy Berg, a showrunner (Counterpart, Warrior Nun, Jack Ryan, The Alienist). “I have come in on shows to write scripts while showrunning.” This both heightens anxiety for showrunners and deprives new writers of the career-boosting ability to come on set and get that experience.
Streaming shows have also depressed the wage scale for writers. Statistics from the WGA show that, in the 2013-2014 season, one-third of all TV writers were getting the minimum rate; today, it’s one-half. Even a quarter of the showrunners are making minimum scale. “I’ve spent 15 years building up a quote [her established payment level] by climbing up the chain, and now my quote doesn’t mean anything because I’m going to get paid the bare minimum,” said Susan Hurwitz Arneson, a television writer (The Tick, Preacher, South Park) who spoke to me in front of the Sony lot, where she is the pickets’ lot coordinator.
Staff writers are not compensated with script fees, only their weekly rate. With the majority of show seasons now reduced to less than ten episodes, weeks of work for most writers per series have also been cut by one-third to one-half. That minimum pay is large—$7,412 per week—but the duration is short. “It sounds like, oh my God, your base salary is $7,000 a week, you rich fucking writer,” said Arneson. “But the reality is, I might have to make that stretch over an entire year. And when you look at that and take out 10, 15, 25 percent for agents, managers, lawyers, taxes, all of that, it’s unlivable. I rent a home still after 15 years.”
Even showrunners earn 46 percent less in median weekly pay on streaming shows than in broadcast. Variety and talk show writers in streaming don’t have minimum scale protections at all, and AMPTP offers have sought to pair any minimum with a day rate, meaning that writers could work just one day a week rather than with a long-term contract. Screenwriters have also been affected, with minimums down 14 percent since 2018, adjusted for inflation, as well as withheld payments that get them to do rewrites that are essentially unpaid work.
The only way for many writers to make all these reductions work is to layer on multiple shows or projects, one after another, to make your year. I have personal experience with that. Before journalism, I worked in postproduction in television, always on non-union shows, usually with relatively short durations. The anxiety of constantly lining up work was a full-time job in itself, on top of the jobs you got hired to do. That unionized writers have to now endure the same hustle has driven the demands in the strike, including a floor on staff sizes and duration of employment.
The AMPTP has so far refused to bargain on those points. “The structural system that they broke, even though it was working for 60 years in broadcast and cable television, is now suddenly not what they want to do in streaming,” Verrone said. Workers in the industry told the Prospect that production schedules had been winding down for months, because the AMPTP knew that they wouldn’t reach agreement by May.
The current system, writers said, makes it impossible for younger writers to gain the set and writers’ room experiences that can move their careers along, and has turned the more veteran writers into gig workers. The top 1 percent of the Guild is doing great, but the workaday writers are struggling. “They’re trying to push us to where there are only 200 writers in town who do everything,” Berg said. “It’s not good for creative content, as well as sanity.”
AS WITH STREAMING IN 2007, ANOTHER EARLY-STAGE INNOVATION has entered the periphery of the negotiations: generative artificial intelligence. Large language models like ChatGPT—powered by the work of writers who aren’t getting paid for the privilege—may not have the ability to write an entire compelling script today, but it’s definitely made writers nervous about a potential (and maybe imminent) future where a chatbot completes a first draft, and writers are brought in only to punch it up. Among the many humorous picket signs carried by union members, I saw one that simply read, “Human Writers.”
In its initial contract proposal, the WGA asked for guarantees that AI will not be used to create any literary material. The AMPTP countered only with an offer of annual meetings to discuss the technology. “That’s what they did in 2007. They said they didn’t want to deal with streaming, because they didn’t know what streaming was, and it may just turn out to be nothing,” said Marjorie David, a television writer (Dark Angel, Millennium, Chicago Hope) whose film adaptation of the book Reading Lolita in Tehran just wrapped shooting. “I don’t know why they think they can pull that football out from under us again. And we understand that if they don’t want to discuss it, it’s important to them.”
AI is just as much an issue for actors and other talent. If technology that doesn’t ask for pay increases and breaks can create the building blocks of movies and films, the studios see the opportunity to slash labor costs and turn the creative process into a line of programming code.
David Dayen
That could be why this strike has engendered so much support throughout the industry. Several writers told me about a rally held last Wednesday at the Shrine Auditorium, with 1,800 people and the heads of six other unions, all of whom voiced their strong endorsement. “I go back 37 years, this is the first time we’ve ever had all Hollywood labor leadership in one room at the same time supporting one another, not fighting with one another,” Verrone said.
The Teamsters, who were lukewarm on whether or not to cross picket lines in 2007, firmly rejected doing so this time. “Teamsters don’t cross picket lines,” said Lindsay Dougherty, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 399, at the rally. “If you throw up a picket line, those fucking trucks will stop, I promise you … if you want to fuck around, you’re gonna find out.”
This is easier to say than to implement. Sources have said that some Teamsters have driven onto “neutral” gates not manned by picketers. “It may take some time for the ‘no WGA picket line crossing’ message to get picked up & internalized by the entire 1.6 million Teamster membership pool so some patience may be required,” wrote one strike captain on Twitter.
However, the strike is impacting production. Late-night talk and variety shows, which have continual writing needs and are always the first affected by strikes, immediately went dark. Other shows, including ones on the fall network schedule, have been affected.
Writers left the meeting at the Shrine energized, and they were still buzzing about it the next day. “We are more united than we have ever been,” said Berg. “Expect that to stay that way.”
Perhaps the two most important sets of representatives at the meeting were executives from the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America. Both of those unions have contracts that expire on June 30. The DGA begins negotiation sessions this week.
This has sparked some concern among writers. During the 2007 strike, the DGA made a deal that undercut the WGA’s negotiating leverage, and other writers talked about how historically the DGA has made quicker deals. This has led to kind of an inverse of pattern bargaining, where instead of one union taking on a company or industry and the other unions within that industry benefiting from it, “the industry’s multinational conglomerates coalesce, and bargain against either the most collaborative union or the most willing to make a deal, or the one that’s in trouble financially,” Verrone said. “And then they apply that to the other unions by saying, ‘Look, you’re putting the town out of work.’”
The DGA’s presence at the solidarity rally, and their unwillingness to bargain early as they normally do, has writers feeling more hopeful. In addition, the DGA and WGA issues don’t line up as cleanly this time around; writers’ rooms have been slashed, but there’s still a director on every film or TV show.
Members of SAG and of IATSE (the union of stagehands, prop workers, and such), whose contract is up next year, have also been well represented on the picket lines, including Rob Lowe, who picketed with his son last week. “I’m here to say this fight is our fight,” said Colleen Kresoja, an actress with nearly 30 years in the business, who was picketing at Sony. Another actress at Fox, Lisa Lawley, told me, “We all deserve a piece of the pie. The gazillionaire, billionaire studio head piece of the pie.”
DOUGHNUTS APPEAR TO BE THE CURRENCY OF THIS STRIKE. Jay Leno was handing them out at Disney; the Gersh Agency sent them over to several locations as well.
Seeing the agents get the backs of the writers is interesting, because they were on the other side of the table from them just a few years ago. In 2019, WGA members fired their agents en masse, protesting an emerging trend of private equity and investment fund ownership and the use of “packaging fees,” direct payments to agents for delivering talent for projects, which ended up competing with other items in a programming budget, thereby reducing writer wages. The dominant agents were also buying in as producers, simultaneously becoming the representation for writers and their bosses.
After a two-year campaign, writers declared victory, as the major agencies all agreed to end packaging fees and cap ownership of production entities at 20 percent. William Morris Endeavor divested from some of its holdings as a result.
Verrone, who was on the negotiating committee for the 2021 agency agreement, said that the fight helped the WGA build power. “Our membership changes over time, and a lot of the folks who were on the line in 2007 are no longer writers, or [new writers today] were in elementary school at the time,” he said. “But they did live through the agency campaign in their recent memory and so that’s something that they can relate to. And because that was the case, we got a hedge fund to agree to give us entirely what we wanted!”
The combination of seeing that victory and of the current support from throughout the profession is giving WGA members a lot of push to see things through. “We’re the creators of their content,” said Berg. “They can’t do it without us.”
