Hollywood! Glamour! Riches!
Yet, people who make a living writing movies, TV shows, and streaming programs are on strike! Most people find it hard to relate to complaints about working on projects with multimillion-dollar budgets, A-list stars, and famous studio moguls. So what’s wrong with this picture?
It’s a faded picture taken in the long ago golden age of Hollywood when creative writing was prized by industry’s barons and writers got respect and decent paychecks. In today’s reality, projects are rich, but writers are poor, for Hollywood has shifted to the same model of plutocratic inequality that has swamped banking, high-tech and other monopolistic sectors.
Wall Street now rules. While we consumers still pay top-dollar for tickets and monthly fees, practically all of the money flows upstream to financiers and corporate poohbahs. This has sunk the real creators (writers, directors, actors, tech crews, and craftpeople) into the quicksand of low-wage, temporary jobs. Legacy production giants like Disney, Paramount, and Universal, (along with überrich new players like Amazon, Apple, Comcast, and Netflix), kowtow to Wall Street, stiffing the people who actually have talent, squeezing corporate profits from their labor.
This is the blue-collar reality of Hollywood you don’t hear about, and battling the same old rank greed of elite bosses is what this strike is about. Instead of making art, today’s industry is focused on slashing labor costs to artificially jack up corporate stock prices.
The pay increase sought by the 10,000 members of the Writers Guild of America is easily affordable by studio powers. Indeed, just one big boss, David Zaslav at Warner Brothers, gets $250 million a year – enough to pay every WGA writer the minimal annual income asked for in this strike.
To help stop the financialization and gigification of yet another workplace go to wga.org.
DO SOMETHING
Want to support the strikers? The WGA Strike Hub has all the actions: https://www.wgacontract2023.org/strike-hub
Daily updates on picketing and other actions can be found on this Google document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G0KN43AkhLQXlz1n6FoWi8wQKq09NsZJS_TEgzz1DqM/edit
To learn more about fighting the gig economy state-by-state, check out this in-depth article from the Economic Policy Institute: https://www.epi.org/publication/state-misclassification-of-workers/
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A Labor Strike in Hollywood? Why Should You Care?