The WGA Is on Strike — Here’s Why We’ll Win
A primer on the Writers Guild of America's strike, what its members are fighting for, and why writers - and the film/TV industry - will ultimately come out on top
“To make a great film, you need three things — the script, the script, and the script.” — Alfred Hitchcock
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey
Here’s a fun fact: Capitalism is inherently evil. Not a little evil like plastic straws or the decision to cancel “FIREFLY”. Sauron evil. It’s an economic and political system that perpetuates growth over individual well-being, community and national security, and even the fate of our planet. We are compelled to participate in this social construct because there are forces beyond our control in this universe, but the degree to which we make ourselves its slave is up to us. That’s the reason for government regulation and collective bargaining. And that’s why the Writers Guild of America — of which I am a member — is currently on strike against the corporations it props up with their imaginations, their art, their labor.
Everything you watch at the movie theater and almost everything you watch on television was written by a human being or more than one of them. To become qualified to do this job, most of us — and I include myself here — had to study at university, write dozens of scripts to hone our craft, and generally fail a lot to build up the experience and wisdom to be called “professional screenwriters”. All of this costs us financial resources, from tuition, to going into debt trying to survive “making it”, and countless hours of free work to build up our reputations.
In other words, become a working screenwriter requires an extraordinary personal investment of time and resources, thousands and thousands of hours of our lives and college loan and credit card debt that those of us who fail will never recover from. In my case, these debts cost me a number roughly around $250,000 over ten years.
Why do I point this out?
Well, becoming a successful screenwriter generally demands the same amount of time and financial debt as becoming, say, a doctor or lawyer even though many people like to pretend becoming a successful artist is something anyone with a laptop or a Michaels nearby can casually do. Of course, some lucky bastards just immediately blow up and never really incur this kind of scar on their bank account and credit rating. Good for them, truly. The rest of us are less fortunate, and so are left with tremendous burdens to pay off once we “make it” in Hollywood.
Success in film/TV used to mean steady employment throughout a year, residuals that built up over time to provide a substantial income by themselves, and a healthy pension by the time we retired. You know, like a “normal job”. But not anymore.
Now, Hollywood’s employers have largely reduced TV writers to low-paying gig work so we spend most of our time chasing new work, the streamers that dominate have almost entirely eliminated our residuals, and both the employment and income that are available now make ever earning a pension seem like childish fancy.
This chart is one of the most horrific I’ve seen, if you’re curious. It compares what writers working on TV series a decade ago made compared to 2021–22 in the context of the MBA Minimum (the MBA is the collective bargaining agreement that covers WGA work). Essentially, this minimum is the screenwriters’ equivalent of minimum wage. One look here and you can see how the Guild’s membership has shifted dramatically toward providing work at this rate, including scores of seasoned writers and showrunners who are now paid no over-scale premium for their years of experience and expertise.
You might wonder what all this means in terms of real-world numbers. After all, Fox News and Far Right media types tell us everyone in Hollywood is compensated with bucketfuls of sweet liberal gold. Let me break it down for you:
The median weeks worked in 2021–22 by WGA staff-level writers on one-hour streaming series was twenty weeks. For networks and the CW, that was twenty-nine weeks. (Staff writers are as low as you get on the totem pole as a WGA TV writer before your work doesn’t meet Guild requirements for coverage).
This is the total weeks of paid income these writers worked during this period.
For the sake of this analysis, let’s stick with the twenty number. If these twenty weeks are guaranteed, rather than paid as week-by-week gig work, then these writers made $4,446 per week. That means they grossed $88,920.
$88,920 ain’t bad for a low-level position, you say? Okay, sure, you can think that without taking into account the tens of thousands, maybe six figures worth of debt they had to go into just to land that job. But have you considered commissions and WGA dues?
Most writers have an agent, manager, and lawyer that collectively take 25% of their income for their services. The WGA collects another 1.5% in dues. That’s 26.5% that comes off the top. This means $88,920 is really $65,356 or, if you only have an agent or only a manager $74,248.
Then come the taxes, at which point you discover you actually made somewhere between $50,000 and $55,000 if you have a good accountant.
Do you know what MIT estimates you need to make a year from a full-time job as a single person to stay out of poverty in Los Angeles County? $44,138. That’s without crushing college loan and credit card interest to pay each month.
So what this practically means is: it’s actually impossible for the average college graduate to live as a single person in LA on what they make as a one-hour staff writer in television — literally one of the rarest and most coveted jobs in America. It’s even more impossible to provide for a family or invest in their future.
Alex O’Keefe, a staff writer on “THE BEAR”, described on Twitter how this exploitation of struggling artists plays out in real life:
Working [on “THE BEAR”], I was still broke, still on Medicaid. The studio wouldn’t fly me out to the writers’ room in LA, so I worked from my Brooklyn apartment. My heat was out that pandemic winter, my space heater blew out the lights. I worked on episode 8 from a library.
All I can say about Hollywood is this: all that glitters is not gold. I won the lottery, and landed a gig on a low-budget show that became a national sensation. “THE BEAR” was a gift, but in the end, “THE BEAR” was a gig. And between gigs, I barely survive. Ninety-eight percent of staff writers work for the minimum. We don’t receive residuals based on the success of our streaming shows. We don’t have a way to stay afloat between gigs, and every gig feels like a miracle.
O’Keefe later told THE NEW YORKER that when “THE BEAR” was nominated for Best Comedy Series at the Writers Guild of America Awards this past March, he attended the ceremony “with a negative bank account and dressed in a bowtie purchased with credit”. He and the rest of the series’ writers won the Best Comedy Series award that evening.
As this assault on our income and much more was happening to screenwriters over the past two decades, CEO pay, stock value, and profits have skyrocketed. When these corporations try to plead poverty, ask them to provide the receipts.
This might seem unfair to you that the very people who create the content you watch, that provide you entertainment, distraction, sustenance, are treated so shabbily by their employers — and it is — but that’s largely because CEOs and their corporate structures are incapable of recognizing how incapable they are at creating film and TV content themselves. Stock prices are always confused with creative genius with disastrous results.
“SNOWFALL” writer-producer Sal Calleros explains: “‘THE SHIELD’ put FX on the map. ‘MAD MEN’ put AMC on the map. ‘HOUSE OF CARDS’ put Netflix on the map. Writers did that. Not some CEO. Know what you get when you put CEOs in creative lanes? You get Quibi.”
Writer and comedian Adam Conover nailed it during a May 2nd interview on CNN, speaking with anchor Sarah Sidner: “David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of the network I’m talking to you on right now, was paid $250 million last year, a quarter of a billion dollars. That’s about the same level as what 10,000 writers are asking him to pay all of us collectively.”
Screenwriter Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote on Twitter: “They shut down an entire industry rather than part with less than 3% of their record profits.”
On one hand, it’s silly to shake our fists at corporations for behaving so criminally toward the foundational creators of their industries. After all, that’s what all corporations do. They’re unable to stop themselves from undermining their own long-term profits and even sustainability in desperate attempts to make more money this fiscal year.
On the other hand, this is an existential threat to screenwriters — as well as directors and actors, both of which are similarly under threat and might soon strike themselves if this isn’t resolved. Because of this, 97.85% of WGA members voted to stand together, to strike, to slash a line in the sand and dig our heels in and collectively declare, “Enough is enough. Fuck you and you and you and you. You can’t buy another mansion while we can’t even pay our rent — not if you want us to keep providing you content.”
Many Americans — and this idea certainly seems to show up in media headlines — they like to think any work is a privilege. As if a favor is being done for them by giving them a job. When, in fact, it’s your labor, your physical and intellectual capital that fuels the engines of commerce. WGA screenwriters are not “lucky” we get to go into crushing debt, waste hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours on free work, and ultimately score jobs that are the equivalent of having loose change flung at us by our corporate overlords.
We are being screwed over, put simply.
We are being stolen from by the very corporations that, with the help of their media mouthpieces — including some of our industry rags — are trying to gaslight us into thinking art is just a bit of fun, something the spoiled get to create, when what we create literally puts asses in recliners and movie theater seats and drives advertising, subscription fees, and amusement park profits.
They’re not even taking our concerns seriously, either. “We could not have been more clear that this is not a normal negotiation cycle,” WGAW President Meredith Stiehm told THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER. “Our members are feeling like they’re [facing] an existential threat to their very existence as writers. And it fell on deaf ears. We said it over and over again. And what [the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP)] came back with was the standard stuff and seemed very almost casual. It was like they didn’t hear us. And here we are.”
Here’s something Chris Keyser, former WGAW president and WGA Negotiating Committee Co-Chair, said to Deadline on May 2nd, which emphasizes the fact that we’re not asking for anything extraordinary from the AMPTP:
DEADLINE: It seems to me that a success in this negotiation would mark a substantial paradigm shift in the business. How do you see a win transforming it?
KEYSER: Here’s the thing, the things we’re asking for is stuff we had before. This is just an attempt by writers to maintain a livable career, a working career, and that’s it. So, I don’t think we’ve made the argument, and I think it’s true, that these costs are absorbable into film and movie budgets, by and large. They’re small compared to these overall budgets. I think we are arguing to keep a system going that’s worked really well for decades. I don’t mean going back to the old broadcast model. I mean, 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.
“This is just an attempt by writers to maintain a livable career.”
That’s all you really need to know, as far as I’m concerned.
If Hollywood’s studios and streamers can’t fairly pay us what we’re worth even as its CEOs earn amounts too mind-boggling to make sense of, then let’s see how long they can keep paying themselves that without us providing them their content.
Myself, I’m not worried about losing. They can’t beat us because we have all the power. We’ve always had all the power.
Find below photographs from the picket lines, shared with me by my fellow members of the WGA. I live in Australia these days, and it crushes me I can’t be there working the pavement alongside them.
You can read more about the WGA strike here:
Why AI Is the Most Important Issue in the Writers' Strike
The Secret Weapon Helping the Writers Guild Win This Strike
The WGA Strike in Photographs: A 'People's History' by J.W. Hendricks
The Tragedy of Howard Rodman Sr. (or: Why the Writers Guild Is on Strike)
A Matter of Survival: How the WGA Is Trying to Save Feature Screenwriters
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