No Pie for You! (Or: Why Studios and Streamers Can Afford to Share Their Profits with Writers and Actors)
Guest contributor David Slack, former member of the WGAW Board of Directors, breaks down the numbers for us
Today’s edition of 5AM StoryTalk features guest contributor David Slack, whom I’ve invited to discuss the Writers Guild of America strike and why the studios’ and streamers’ claims of poverty when it comes to paying artists fairly are nonsense. Slack is an animation and television writer/producer (most recently, “MAGNUM P.I.”), but, more germane to this conversation, he is also a former member of the WGA West’s Board of Directors who served on the Guild’s 2020 Negotiating Committee - meaning, he’s well-versed in these issues and knows a lot about negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
With both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA on strike, the studios will soon try to turn us against each other - claiming that they can’t possibly pay their writers because the actors are asking for too much and vice versa. Bullshit. Here’s why:
Let’s look at the total gains made in both guilds’ 2020 contracts. At first, it looks like SAG is taking too much…until you consider SAG has 14.5 times more members. Then, it looks like writers are taking too much. But neither is true.
Because that’s not the whole pie.
The studios will happily remind you that almost every dollar one of us wins is actually at least six dollars they have to pay to the other unions and guilds. This isn’t entirely true because they do everything they can to grind us all, but let’s run with it for now.
The chart below compares WGA and SAG 2020 contract gains against estimated gains for Teamsters, IATSE, and DGA.1 And again, it looks like the studios have a point. Every dollar one of us wins is a dollar the others can’t have.
But again…that’s not the whole pie.
This is the whole pie (below): the actual and estimated total gains of each major union and guild contract in 2020 measured against estimated studio revenues over the three-year term of the last WGA deal.2
The “slices” they want us to fight over are so small, I couldn’t even get them to show up in Excel.
So, when the AMPTP starts releasing statements and articles start showing up in the trades claiming that any of us are asking for too much, call bullshit.
Nothing we could ever ask for would be enough to “wreck the business.” And by the way, we are the business.
Writers, actors, drivers, crews, and directors are labor. We are a cost of doing business - and after two years of 6+% inflation, that cost needs to go up. They’re clearing $30 billion per year in pure profit.3
But even with billions on hand, the studios still don’t want to pay us. Not because they can’t afford it — but because they think they can get away with it.
Think again.
You can find David Slack on Twitter and Bluesky.
You can read more of 5AM Storytalk’s WGA strike coverage here.
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Note from David Slack: Teamsters, IATSE, and DGA don't release numbers on the value of, or gains made in, their contracts. To roughly estimate the gains, I assumed the studios would employ pattern bargaining with adjustments made for union size. WGA, Teamsters, and DGA are all smaller unions - with 11000, 5000, and 19000 members, respectively. So, I used $200M for each. IATSE is about the same size as SAG-AFTRA, with 168,000 and 160,000 members respectively, so I used the $318M figure for them.
https://www.wgacontract2023.org/announcements/the-cost-of-settling Note from DS: I totaled the amounts in the "annual revenues" column and multiplied by three to get their three-year revenues.