For the past few years, our screens both big and small have been lousy with “eat the rich” stories. From Succession to The White Lotus, from Glass Onion to You, Hollywood has greenlit a wave of projects that gesture at a kind of self awareness about the astronomical wealth it controls. As Writers Guild of America members vote on a possible strike this week, we’re all about to find out whether the industry is ready to put its money where its mouth is.
From April 11 through 17, members of the Writers Guild of America will vote online to decide whether or not to authorize a walkout. Beyond imperiling some of your favorite TV shows, a strike would shape the economic fate of tens of thousands of writers, whose working conditions help set the bar for countless more beyond them. (If writers aren’t getting paid, then writers’ assistants and script coordinators and production assistants and others definitely aren’t getting paid.)
It’s both easier and way more fun to look at Hollywood only through its historic self-mythology as a fantasy land where everyone’s creativity finds support, everyone becomes rich, and the champagne is always flowing. For a while now, however, Hollywood has been forced to acknowledge that this was never the case. Instead, like any other industry, it’s a machine that systemically rewards some more than others. Just like companies across tech and media began the year with mass layoffs, the entertainment industry has spent months sowing uncertainty with mass cancellations while continuing to squeeze some of its workers dry.
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The past decade has upended the entertainment industry as it once worked—and while the streaming boom has showered us all with more TV than we have time to watch, writers’ pay has fallen. In March, the WGA released a report titled “Writers Are Not Keeping Up,” which breaks down pay decreases writers have seen across the board. More writers are working at the union’s negotiated minimum now than were a decade ago, the Guild reports. That includes showrunners, 49 percent of whom reportedly work for the minimum pay. (That’s up 16 percent from a decade ago, per the WGA.) As is the case for workers across the country, inflation has also taken a bite out of writers’ paychecks.
The WGA’s current contract will end on May 1, and studios have spent months preparing for a possible walkout. Just like during the most recent writer’s strike (which ran for 100 days from 2007 to 2008), you can expect to see more unscripted programming in the event of a strike, since those shows are not subject to WGA agreement. According to The Hollywood Reporter, some studios and networks have also delayed the premieres of original content, possibly to ensure that they have new material to run in the fall.
The decisions made in the month ahead will impact far more than our favorite TV series. In March, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement that its “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.” But what does it mean for us, as consumers, to simultaneously love our favorite shows and know that their writers might be working without health insurance?
Abbott Elementary writer Brittani Nichols pointed out last month in a Twitter thread that while story editors are guaranteed script fees, staff writers are not. Even after working on multiple shows, Nichols wrote, many writers are “forced to repeat that entry level job over & over again.” That script fee, Nichols wrote, can “be the difference between you qualifying for health insurance or not.” (Representatives for the WGA and AMPTP did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on the tweets at the time.)
The ground has been shaking beneath writers’ and creators’ feet for years, thanks to both the COVID-19 pandemic and an ongoing streaming bubble that finally seems ready to burst. Disney slashed thousands of jobs earlier this year, and Warner Bros. Discovery spent the better part of last year canceling seemingly everything HBO Max ever made. (That is, after some layoffs.) Last year, months after Netflix launched an official website for fans called Tudum, the company laid off a chunk of its staff (composed, predominantly, of women of color the company had actively poached from other positions) with only two weeks’ pay. Months later, Netflix itself cut hundreds of employees and started canceling shows following a plunge in both its subscribers numbers and stock price.
The cost-cutting that’s plagued Hollywood in recent years, and even months, comes alongside a similar trend in both tech and media. At the same time, we’ve seen organization efforts spread nationwide among hourly-wage workers at companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks. It might seem absurd to compare TV writers to Amazon warehouse workers, or to baristas at Starbucks. Or, for that matter, to equate writers for Disney shows to the park workers who sued Disney in 2019 for better pay as some of them allegedly lived in their cars. But as with any industry, the treatment of one group directly affects others. A successful WGA strike could, for instance, boost other unions within the entertainment industry as they seek similar or related protections in their own contracts.
Writer and showrunner Kirk Moore recently pointed out on Twitter that the public’s perception of writers’ wages can also be at odds with reality. “It’s like contract work, especially as you’re working your way up,” he wrote. With short seasons, mini rooms, etc— it’s hard.”
“Part of what writers are saying is this used to be a profession where you could make a living,” Moore added. “Now, many writers are struggling to do so, because of the ways [they are] paid or underpaid and overworked.”
Thanks to media mergers, writers including Adam Ruins Everything creator Adam Conover have said that they’ve found themselves with fewer venues to pitch. By thinning out the competition for writers’ work, these mergers have made the fight for pay increases even more difficult—hence, perhaps, the increased number of writers working for rock-bottom pay. As Nichols put it in her Twitter thread, “[O]ur minimum wage has become our ceiling.”
In a world where studios have the cash to put down, say, $450 million for two Knives Out sequels, that should not be true for anyone. And over the next week, the thousands of writers who make up the WGA will decide whether they are ready to pull the plug.
