Thousands of Hollywood TV and filmmakers will go on strike this Tuesday. Writers Guild of America stated this after talks with studios and streamers over wages and other terms ended without agreement. The strike will immediately halt late-night shows, and it could cause significant delays for TV series and movies scheduled to be released later this year.
Writers Guild of America board members “acting upon the authority granted to them by their memberships have voted unanimously to call a strike,” the organization tweeted.
The writers’ union said studios’ responses to its demands were “wholly insufficient given the existential crisis facing writers.”
It came after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), representing studios including Disney and Netflix, said that negotiations “concluded without an agreement.”
The last time Hollywood writers laid down their pens and keyboards, in 2007, the strike lasted for 100 days, costing the Los Angeles entertainment industry around $2 billion.
This time, the two sides are clashing as writers demand higher pay and a greater share of profits from the boom in streaming. Studios, on the other hand, say they must cut costs due to economic pressures.
The WGA accused studios of seeking to create a “gig economy,” in which writing would be “an entirely freelance profession.”
The AMPTP said it had offered a “comprehensive package proposal” including higher pay for writers.
But it was unwilling to improve that offer “because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the Guild continues to insist upon.”
Breakdown:
Writers say it is becoming impossible to earn a living, as salaries have flatlined or declined after inflation, even as employers reap profits and fatten executives’ paychecks.
More writers than ever are working at the union-mandated minimum wage, while shows hire fewer people to script ever-shorter series.
The AMPTP statement said WGA demands “mandatory staffing“. This would require studios to hire a set number of writers “for a specified period, whether needed or not“. This demand was a central sticking point.
There’s a need to rework the formula that calculates how writers get paid for streaming shows that stay on platforms like Netflix for years after they’re written.
With streaming, writers get a fixed annual payout. This is even if their work generates a smash hit like “Bridgerton” or “Stranger Things”. It almost always doesn’t matter if their works are streamed by hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide.
“These amounts remain far too low for the global reuse of WGA-covered programming on these massive services,” says the guild.
According to one Los Angeles-based TV writer, the negotiations will decide how they are financially compensated. Particularly by streamers now and in the future.
The WGA also wants to address the future impact of artificial intelligence on writing.
cc: Punch Ng
