The Writers Guild of America West and East, the sister unions that represent the country’s film and television writers, are teetering on the edge of Hollywood’s biggest strike in 15 years. Hollywood has been unionized for 100 years. In that time, there have been a little over a dozen major labor strikes, the last being the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America work stoppage, which lasted 14 weeks and had a profound impact on the industry. If this strike goes forward, it could shut down production on most television shows, pushing back the return of many programs now set for the fall.
At stake in the current negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (an organization that represents the old Hollywood studios and upstart streaming companies alike) is nothing less than the survival of the occupation of film and television writing.
“Driven in large part by the shift to streaming, writers are finding their work devalued in every part of the business. While company profits have remained high and spending on content has grown, writers are falling behind,” the WGA said in a statement. “The companies have used the transition to streaming to cut writer pay and separate writing from production, worsening working conditions for series writers at all levels. “
So, the central component of the negotiations is money, but only to a certain extent. That’s not surprising anytime that grievances reach a strike threat, but there are other concerns as well.
W.G.A.’s members make on average around $250,000 a year before taxes, union dues and commissions to agents, managers and lawyers. That may seem like a healthy salary, but they don’t agree. The reality is that the seemingly big paychecks of Hollywood have to last through the lean periods that nearly every writer experiences. It’s a profession of feast or famine. It’s also an issue of fairness according to the writers: “On TV staffs, more writers are working at minimum regardless of experience, often for fewer weeks [of pay]….While series budgets have soared over the past decade, median writer-producer pay has fallen.”
Traditionally, one of the biggest buffers against that volatility is residuals: the money that writers earn from the reuse of their work, encompassing everything from cable and syndicated reruns of old television episodes to airlines licensing movies for in-flight viewing. The formulas used to calculate the money owed for various forms of reuse are complicated and vary widely across platforms. As a result, the payments can be relatively tiny or very large.
But the small payouts are increasingly outpacing the big ones. Programming is moving away from theatrical, broadcast and cable to streaming platforms, which typically pay residuals at a far lower rate. This is why one of the major sticking areas in the current negotiation is bringing streaming residuals more in line with broadcast and cable rates.
There are many other issues on the table related to that of residuals details; others concern the time spent creating a TV episode and the proliferation in streaming television of so-called mini rooms — writing staffs that are smaller in size and active for a shorter duration than a traditional writers’ room.
There is also the potentially-transformative impact of AI, and how it could be used to generate scripts, bypassing writers altogether and decimating their numbers. The guild wants to establish some sort of policy on AI and authorship, especially if a writer’s ideas are used as the basis for AI-generated work.
“The WGA’s proposal to regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies ensures the Companies can’t use AI to undermine writers’ working standards, including compensation, residuals, separated rights and credits,” it noted.
The studios and streamers are holding firm, pointing to their battered stock prices, reduced box office revenue and round after round of layoffs as evidence that things are tough for the production side too. The WGA rebuts: “The entertainment segments of the industry’s major companies — Netflix, Paramount Global, Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox, Disney, and Comcast NBCUniversal — posted an average $29 billion in annual operating income between 2017 and 2021” adding, “Legacy media companies’ profits in 2022 were lower, but the companies expect improvement in the near term as they build towards increased profitability in streaming,” therefore, they argue, the producers can well afford to compensate writers more fairly.
The two sides present compelling points. Hence, the stalemate. One thing they can agree on is that, “The goal is to keep production active so that all of us can continue working and continue to deliver to consumers the best entertainment product available in the world.”
How they will be able to reach an agreement that would allow them to achieve this goal for now is an unanswered question. The deadline for negotiations is running out: 11.59 on May 1st.
