Why the writers strike is about much more than Hollywood

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SHOW STOPPER — As the clock hit midnight, the Writers Guild of America went on strike after over 15 years of labor peace. Your favorite shows won’t stop immediately — with most television produced well in advance, the two sides still have some runway to work out their differences before TV shows abruptly begin to end. The same goes for new movie releases.

But this year’s work stoppage is about much more than the programming that fills up screens. There are issues surrounding the WGA strike that reach well beyond the soundstages of Hollywood.

There are clear parallels between the concerns at the heart of the writers’ strike and other looming worker actions around the country. At the heart of the WGA’s complaints is that a shift in strategy towards streaming content from studios has turned writers into gig workers with no job security — an issue that also has implications for the 340,000 or so workers at UPS whose contract is up later this year.

“The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing,” the WGA said in a statement.

As more shows come online due to streaming, studios have begun what are colloquially referred to as “mini-rooms” — writers’ rooms, or groups of writers, who collaborate on scripts — for shows that have yet to be greenlit. Writers working in these “mini-rooms” are often paid less, due to the fact that not all of their work reaches streaming platforms. And even when shows are greenlit, the way writers make residuals — back pay from shows that go into syndication or air frequently — has been thrown off as well, due to the switch to streaming.

If these all sound like problems ripe for discussion at a dinner party in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, you wouldn’t be wrong. But setting aside the Hollywood specifics, the issue of the gig economy is roiling unions around the country. A central problem that UPS drivers have is that they are now competing directly against gig workers like drivers for DoorDash and seasonal Amazon employees.

“We want to keep our work. We want to not destroy the jobs that we have. We don’t want gig jobs. We don’t want Uber Eats or DoorDash,” said Local 804 president Vinnie Perrone earlier this year.

Meanwhile, executives’ responses to worker demands this year are largely the same, no matter the industry. They argue that unions should examine the state of the broader economy before making demands — that if they authorize too significant of a pay bump in a time of deep economic uncertainty and broad-based layoffs, the whole industry could be imperiled. This is true whether you’re driving for UPS or writing television, senior officials in both camps say.

As of today, around 11,000 film and television writers are on strike. When they leave their posts, though, it’s not only scribes that Hollywood loses. Most late-night shows have plans to go dark immediately, depriving networks of programming and other workers on these shows of paychecks. The same is true of any shows in production that have ground to a halt. As the strike drags on, these losses will add up. The 2007-08 writers’ strike, which lasted 100 days, cost the state of California’s economy alone an estimated $2.1 billion.

In the 15 years between the end of the 2008 strike and today, the WGA estimates that the industry’s profits have ballooned and writers’ pay has failed to keep up. But there’s a fight over burgeoning technology that complicates their argument and could presage labor disagreements across the country: the use of artificial intelligence.

In the WGA’s strike announcement, they included an update on where negotiations stand. Summarizing their proposal on AI, they wrote, in part, “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers rejected this proposal and countered by offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.

Major economic disputes between the WGA and the AMPTP have happened for decades. But disagreements over AI are new. Programs like ChatGPT are not yet advanced enough to write a competent episode of television (the mind travels naturally to a Simpson’s joke: Mr. Burns having monkeys writing on typewriters, and a monkey coming up with “it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”). There is, however, fear that AI could immediately help studios devalue writers’ work, another worry shared across industries.

“The immediate fear of AI isn’t that us writers will have our work replaced by artificially generated content,” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill tweeted today. “It’s that we will be underpaid to rewrite that trash into something we could have done better from the start.”

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