Hollywood writers have until Monday to authorize their union to call a strike amid contentious contract negotiations with major studios.
The authorization, based on a vote by guild members, would grant the leadership of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) the ability to call a strike if it can’t reach a contract with Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) by 1 May.
“Writers are not keeping up,” the WGA argues in a 2023 report. “The companies have leveraged the streaming transition to underpay writers, creating more precarious, lower-paid models for writers’ work.”
In the report, the WGA, which has more than 11,000 members, argues the shift in the entertainment industry to streaming services has resulted in cuts to pay for writers, despite an increase in investments in content and consistent profitability.
“What’s at stake is the viability of television as a career,” said Brittani Nichols, a writer on Abbott Elementary and WGA member. “Right now a lot of people are struggling to string together quality jobs that can allow them to exist in a city like Los Angeles.”
Nichols compared the demands of members to those of other workers facing increasing pressures of economic inequality and rising costs of living.
“It’s not that the studios can’t afford these things. It’s, in my opinion, that they don’t care about what’s right or fair and they want to extract as much value from us for the least amount of money as possible, and that’s something we’re standing up to.”
The AMPTP represents entertainment media corporations that include Amazon, Apple, CBS, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Global, Sony and Warner Bros Discovery.
Since 2013-2014, the proportion of writers working at minimum pay levels has increased from 33% of all TV series writers to 49% in 2021-2022, with recorded increases in all writer positions, according to the report. Over the last decade, median writer pay has declined by 4%, or 23% when adjusted for inflation.
The WGA is calling for increased compensation and residuals from features, ending the practice of mini-rooms (smaller writing rooms where a showrunner and a limited group of writers develop scripts), and increases in contributions to pension and health funds for workers.
In a message to members, the WGA stated that the AMPTP had pushed for “rollbacks designed to offset any gains” in contract negotiations. “In short, the studios have shown no sign that they intend to address the problems our members are determined to fix.”
“The way that writers’ rooms work now, the way that we’re being paid, the way that we’re dealing with cuts in episode orders, all of that has slowly eroded our ability to make a living doing this,” said Susan Hurwitz Arneson, a writer in the industry for 15 years who has worked on shows such as AMC’s Preacher and the forthcoming John Wick prequel television series The Continental. “For a showrunner, it’s excruciating and impossible. For younger writers coming up, they’re never getting the mentoring and teaching to be showrunners because they are never allowed to be on set.”
Mini-rooms were originally meant to be supplementary support for a project but have been exploited as a loophole to pay minimum compensation to writers and avoid paying producer or showrunner fees for additional production duties, Hurwitz Arneson argued. She voted “yes” on the strike authorization, she said, in an effort to oppose trends she says are deteriorating pay and working conditions for writers.
“This is about people that create, from nothing, a product that everybody across the world enjoys, a product that makes billions of dollars for giant corporations. What we’re asking for is less than 2% of the dollar of what these companies are making, in order for us to benefit from our hard work and be paid fairly for it,” said Hurwitz Arneson. “We should be paid for the talent, hard work, the heart, the sweat, the tears and for the generation of worlds and products that employ thousands of people in this industry.”
The union has also taken aim at arguments by the studios of financial woes in the industry, as several entertainment media corporations have conducted layoffs in the past year; Disney announced cuts of 7,000 jobs that began this year, Netflix cut 450 jobs in 2022, citing decreases in subscription revenue, and about 120 workers were laid off at Showtime this year after a merger with Paramount.
Operating profits at the largest entertainment media companies in 2021 were about $28bn, a decrease from pre-pandemic profit levels, but the WGA cited continuing investments in streaming services, mergers and restructurings, and spending billions on stock buybacks.
CEOs of the largest entertainment media corporations receive exorbitant salaries. The Warner Discovery CEO, David Zaslav, received $39.3m in total compensation in 2022. The Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos received $40m, his co-CEO Reed Hastingsreceived $34m, and the Paramount Global CEO, Bob Bakish, received $32m.
The last time Hollywood writers went on strike was in November 2007, an action that lasted 100 days and halted production of major TV shows. The strike of 12,000 writers largely focused on disagreements with the AMPTP over emerging digital media platforms and streaming residuals. The Directors Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild will begin their new union contract negotiations this year with AMPTP.
The Actors’ Equity national council, which represents more than 51,000 professional theater workers, authorized a strike as new union contract negotiations with the Broadway League, the trade association for the Broadway industry, continue, with 90% signing a strike pledge if an agreement isn’t reached.
It is hard to predict which shows would be affected by a WGA strike, but during the 2007-2008 strike, top programs including Breaking Bad and Prison Break went on hiatus or had shortened seasons.
