[It’s been 15 years since the last WGA strike, and the stakes
are far greater.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT HAPPENS IF THERE’S A HOLLYWOOD WRITERS STRIKE?  
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Alissa Wilkinson
April 25, 2023
Vox
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_ It’s been 15 years since the last WGA strike, and the stakes are
far greater. _

WGA strikers during the 2007-08 strike. , David McNew/Getty Images

 

Alissa Wilkinson
[[link removed]] covers film and
culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics
Circle and the National Society of Film Critics.

In late April, eligible members of the Writers Guild of America —
the people who write the Hollywood shows and movies we watch in
theaters and at home — voted to authorize
[[link removed]] a
strike, by a historic margin: 97.85 percent voted yes.

That doesn’t mean a strike will happen. But the WGA’s contract
with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP),
which represents about 350 TV and film production companies, ends on
May 1. And if the two parties can’t reach agreement about the terms
of the next three-year contract, then writers could walk off the job
as soon as that happens.

Writers strikes are something the average person doesn’t have to
think about most of the time. At most, we have hazy memories of
strikes from years past, maybe wondering why some seasons of _The
Office_ seem shorter when we stream them. But they’re significant
moments in cultural history, and often have to do with different
aspects of the business trying to figure out how to deal with the
giant technological advances that drive Hollywood.

So here are five questions about the possible WGA strike, why it
matters, and what it might mean for you and for the future of
entertainment.

What is a “writers strike,” anyhow?

In simple terms, a writers strike means that a subset of the members
of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the labor union to which most
working writers in Hollywood belong, will stop working until the WGA
reaches an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and
Television Producers (AMPTP). No member of the WGA will write new
scripts for TV shows or movies until the WGA membership votes to end
the strike. For most writers, this also means forgoing income from
writing for the duration of the strike.

Members of the WGA who work in broadcast TV, radio, streaming news,
online media, nonfiction podcasts, nonfiction TV, and public TV will
stay on the job. (That includes me: I’m a member of the Vox Media
Union, which is part of the WGA East, and thus in the online media
sector. However, I wouldn’t be able to sell any scripts or options
to a struck company in the event of a strike. I wasn’t planning on
it, but lots of people in those sectors would be affected too.)

[Against green grass and blue sky, a line of picketing writers hold
signs identifying them as the 1988 striking Writers Guild. Behind them
is a busy street with a bus stop and cars.]

Members of the WGA on strike in 1988, in Los Angeles.

 George Rose/Getty Images

When writers strike, the ripple effects can be large, particularly for
people who work in TV. Production slows down or stops, which means
that all of the other people who work in the entertainment business
— electricians, caterers, set dressers, directors, background actors
— have to find other work. It’s also noticeable to audiences,
since some TV shows have to stop production, while others are delayed
or truncated.

The goal of a strike is to force the AMPTP to negotiate, with the hope
of reaching an agreement that both sides sign on to, and a new minimum
basic agreement, or MBA — kind of like a minimum wage for writer
jobs — with terms that will last for three years. The WGA’s
contract is renegotiated every three years. But there hasn’t been a
strike since 2007-08.

How do screenwriters make money?

If this was a joke, the answer would probably be “slinging
coffee.” But plenty of writers do support their families by working
on TV shows and movies, coming up with original ideas to sell to movie
studios, adapting existing IP, and doing lots of other writerly
things. To put it simply, writers are the first block in the tower on
which the rest of the product is built.

Here are some of the more common ways that writers make money (though
certainly there are more):

* Write a movie script, then find a way to sell it to a Hollywood
studio for a lump sum.
* Sell an _idea_ for a movie to the studio. Maybe get hired to
write it.
* Write a book or create some other intellectual property that a
studio buys outright or “options” (giving them, well, the option
to adapt it). You might also get hired to adapt it, for more money;
you might not.
* Get hired to revise an existing screenplay, often one that was
written by someone else. (You know when there are seven writing
credits on a movie? That’s what’s going on there.)
* Sell an idea for a TV show, or maybe a pilot script, to a studio.
You might also get hired to be the showrunner, an executive producer
who makes the whole thing happen.
* Get hired to write on a TV show as part of a writers’ room —
which, importantly, can mean you also end up producing the show, which
in turn means you get paid extra.

And then there’s residuals. Those are like royalty payments for
screenwriters. If you have a writing credit on something, and the
rights to air it are bought by a cable network (for instance), then
you get some money. If you’ve worked a long time, or worked on a
long TV show or a particularly popular one that runs in syndication a
lot (think _Friends_), then you get a check periodically for your
residuals. That can be a substantial part of your income. Part of the
reason that residuals were first negotiated by the WGA was the
understanding that if a network is re-running a previously created
show in a particular timeslot, that’s taking away work (and thus
income) from a writer who might otherwise be writing something that
fills that slot.

There are plenty of other ways that writers make money in Hollywood.
What’s important to note in all of this is that very few writers
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making a huge amount of money.

The WGA’s contract is designed to make sure that writers make at
least a minimum amount and aren’t undercut by studios — in other
words, to ensure that it’s viable to make a living wage while also
creating some of the most lucrative products in the world.

THE WGA CONTRACT TRIES TO ENSURE THAT IT’S VIABLE TO MAKE A LIVING
WAGE WHILE ALSO CREATING SOME OF THE MOST LUCRATIVE PRODUCTS IN THE
WORLD

Why are the writers considering striking? It seems like
there’s _more_ work to be had in Hollywood, not less.

As with everything in Hollywood, the answer to this is both very
complicated and simple. Studios and production companies want to make
more money, in most cases to please the investors and the corporations
that own them, and so they find ways to cut corners wherever they can.
On top of it, technology always introduces uncertainty and change in
Hollywood, and the WGA’s issues have to do with two big technical
changes: the prevalence of streaming, and the looming challenge of AI.

Let’s start with streaming services, which need a constant stream of
content to attract and retain subscribers. For a few years, that’s
meant that Hollywood’s writers have been kept very busy, and new
series were ordered all the time, which meant more jobs, in theory,
for writers.

But streaming services are, in many regards, the problem. Certainly,
they created more jobs in production — or at least they did, until
recently, when studios started canceling shows and contracting their
budgets, including those for streaming platforms. Yet the real
problems are the type of jobs, the ways studios keep costs down, and
the deflation of wages, all of which make it hard for writers to pay
their bills.

It might seem counterintuitive, but while the number of jobs available
has soared, and the budget allotted to productions has risen
substantially, the amount that writers in those jobs earn has gone
down, in some cases quite significantly. According to a bulletin that
the WGA produced
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spring ahead of negotiations, the average writer-producer pay — many
writers working in TV pick up a producer credit as well — has
actually declined 4 percent over the past decade. If you adjust that
for inflation, it’s a 23 percent decline, and that’s in a world
where the cost of living has soared (particularly in major cities,
where the jobs tend to be).

There are a lot of complex reasons for this, some of which require
pretty technical explanations. But some of them are observable to the
average person. Most TV shows on streaming have far shorter seasons
than their broadcast cousins — 8 or 10 episodes, as opposed to 22 or
more — and that means writers get paid less for each job. The space
between seasons can also be very long on streamers (years or more),
rather than the few months of a broadcast show. Significantly more
writers at all levels are working for the MBA than in the past. And
though there are fewer episodes in a season, streaming showrunners
(the people who are ultimately in charge of managing shows and making
creative decisions) are working as long as their peers in broadcast
TV, per the WGA’s report, but because of the way the contract is set
up, their median salary is about 46 percent of the broadcast median.

Screenwriters who work in movies have their own set of headaches.
Perhaps the biggest comes with the fact that median screenwriter pay
is the same as it was in 2018, and when you factor in inflation, that
means it’s declined by 14 percent. And, the WGA found that writers
who were paid less than $150,000 for their screenplay were asked to do
more unpaid rewrites than those paid more for their screenplays, which
amounts to a lot of unpaid work conducted over months that less
experienced (or less famous) writers have to do in order to be paid
the 50 percent of their fee that they’re still owed. Screenwriters
who write movies that end up being released to streaming services —
and that’s a lot of people — can find they’re paid MOW rates
(movie of the week), which is significantly less than for a theatrical
film.

[Picketers in red shirts holding Writers Guild signs protest on a
Burbank, California, street.]

Members of the WGA on the picket line during the 2007-2008 strike.

 Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg via Getty Images

One issue that’s become a significant sticking point for the writers
is something called a “mini room,” a practice that began about a
decade ago but has exploded
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streaming shows have multiplied in the past few years. In a mini room
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fewer writers than usual (two or three, instead of the usual seven or
eight) are hired to write a number of episodes of a show before it’s
even picked up for production. The writers in mini rooms generally are
paid less than they would be in a regular writers room, and the jobs
of writing and production, which are often combined, are now
separated. The guild argues that this separation is a serious issue,
since a writer’s progression from lower-level staff writer toward
higher-paid, higher-experience jobs — ideally leading to an eventual
position that requires experience, such as a showrunner — happens
through mentorship during the production process. The mini-room model
makes writers as disposable as possible, and ensures they’re not
even around (and thus getting paid) when production begins.

And then there’s residuals. Streaming created a host of residuals
issues, if only because when streaming first became part of WGA
contracts 15 years ago, people thought of streaming as “TV on a
computer,” something only a few people would ever really want. In
2007-08, when the guild last went on strike
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streaming residuals were one of the main issues being negotiated; back
then, the offer on the table to writers was _zero_.

Now — when a whole generation can’t even really remember regular
broadcast TV — the way streaming residuals are calculated still
hasn’t caught up with broadcast, even though many shows are created
just for streaming platforms. There’s a complicated set of equations
and designations that mandate what kind of residuals different
programs pay out. In general, the biggest problem is that residuals on
streaming are lower than in broadcast TV. If you write on a broadcast
show, and it’s a huge success, then you get extra payment, in part
because your show is bringing more eyeballs to advertisements or cable
subscriptions. But if you write, say, _Stranger Things_, and it’s a
massive hit for Netflix, bringing in thousands of subscribers and
revenue, you don’t share at all in the profit even though you’re a
main reason the platform is succeeding. That, the WGA argues, needs to
change.

One issue that really illustrates the challenges streaming presents is
the divide between comedy-variety shows on streaming (like
Apple’s _The Problem with Jon Stewart_ or Peacock’s _The Amber
Ruffin Show_) and the same type of show on broadcast (like Comedy
Central’s _The Daily Show_ or CBS’s _The Late Show with Stephen
Colbert_). Whether on streaming or broadcast, this type of show
requires long, late hours from staff, including writers. On broadcast,
writers are covered by the MBA; the studios, however, have refused to
hire writers under the MBA for streaming comedy-variety shows.
Instead, they negotiate the rates individually — and for most
writers, that means they get paid less than those on broadcast, even
though the product and workload is the same.

All of this is a huge issue, but there’s another one
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AI. For writers in particular, that’s not just some buzzy tech idea.
It’s a threat to their livelihood, and one that could in the end be
a much bigger problem for writers than everyone may anticipate.

A lot of the TV episodes and movies produced by Hollywood are, by
nature, highly formulaic. (Think of a police procedural, or a Hallmark
movie.) A scenario could arise in which an AI tool is used to generate
an idea for a plot, or even a full script, and then a writer is hired
to revise it, or punch it up. This would cut costs for the studio, in
a few ways. They wouldn’t need to pay a writer for their ideas
anymore; they’d work at a lower rate, since technically they’d be
“adapting” an idea. And you can easily imagine a scenario in which
someone gets their intern to do a pass, or just does it themselves.

“Won’t the result be ridiculously unwatchable?” you might ask.
The answer here is complicated — after all, a lot of the
“content” pushed through the tubes and onto your TV can feel
suspiciously like no human really touched the script, right?

There are other issues, too — problems the AMPTP likely also has an
interest in staving off. For instance, if a software program was
involved in drafting a script, then can the creators of the
program’s algorithm claim part of the credit and, therefore, part of
the residuals? And since AIs currently are incapable of distinguishing
between copyrighted and freely available material, the potential for
rights infringement
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huge.

But more importantly, the issue at hand is whether AI poses threats
that we can’t possibly imagine right now. Just because a tool
doesn’t write particularly compelling scripts today doesn’t mean
it won’t in a year, or in three years. Part of the reason the WGA
has so much trouble with streaming is that nobody quite realized how
the technology would morph and change, or how dominant it would
become, so quickly.

AI has the potential to do the same, and much faster. It could not
just reduce writers’ pay, either — it could eliminate their jobs
altogether for large swaths of entertainment output. The WGA can’t
keep the technology from developing, but they can ensure that any
studio that wants to do business with their writers will have to
ensure basic standards of human involvement and pay them a wage that
keeps pace with the budgets and success of the studios hiring them.

[A man in light summer clothes sits at a bus stop in Los Angeles,
holding a Writers Guild strike sign and smoking a cigarette.]

A striking WGA member in 1988 waits for the bus.

 George Rose/Getty Images

If the writers strike, what happens to my shows?

It very much depends on which shows you watch!

The first effects of a strike, should it happen, will be felt in
late-night variety and comedy shows like _Saturday Night
Live_ or _The Tonight Show_. Their scripts are written extremely
close to when the show is shot (in some cases, on the same day).
Without a script, the show can’t go on. Many of those networks will
air re-runs of the show in place of original shows, but for obvious
reasons, viewership drops — and that means reduced potential for ad
revenue. The studios own the networks, and ad revenue provides their
bottom lines.

Shows in which writing staffs are working on future episodes as the
show is being shot (such as network dramas with lengthy seasons) will
be hit next. The last time there was a writers strike, for instance,
shows like _The Office_ and _Scrubs_ had to cut their seasons
short. (Episodes of Donald Trump’s new show _The Celebrity
Apprentice_ — a twist on his non-famous-person show _The
Apprentice_, which NBC had quit airing due to low ratings — took
their place.)

That 2007-08 strike took place mid-season, which is part of why it’s
so memorable. This strike would likely begin in early May, as most of
the more traditional shows are wrapping up their seasons; _Law and
Order_’s season finale, for instance, airs in early May. Scripts for
shows nearing the end of their seasons are likely being rushed into
completion, as well as scripts for a potential fall premiere, with the
goal of keeping interruption to a minimum. The real impact would be
felt if the strike were to extend into the fall season. The 1988
strike started on March 7 and ended August 7, which meant most of the
shows had to start their fall season in late October or early
November, rather than late September or early October. In those days,
when network TV was kind of the only game in town, that mattered a
lot.

But it matters less now, and that is the issue at hand. Many of the
shows we watch now already have huge gaps between seasons, or
stockpile scripts with a mini-room, or don’t come back at the same
time every year, so the effects will be less obvious to the audience.
Reality (or “unscripted”) TV is hugely popular, and studios have
typically leaned on it to fill programming holes in case of a strike.
(That might not be true forever
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especially since unscripted TV hours are grueling and the people who
make it have been considering their own organizing efforts.)

In addition, there’s a _huge_ pile of TV shows that you can watch
— probably a bunch you’ve been meaning to catch up on — that
you’ll watch if your favorite show has to delay during the strike.
Many streamers (Netflix in particular) also have found success with
international programming, and could import more, from writers who
aren’t WGA members. Movies, meanwhile, take a lot longer to make and
get to the public than TV shows, so the effects will likely be even
less obvious.

So unless you’re an avid late-night viewer, or unless you work in
the industry and can’t find work, you may not even realize a strike
is happening — that is, unless it goes on for a very, very long
time.

Or, of course, unless other unions get involved.

Wait, other unions? Is that a possibility?

Maybe. We’re in unfamiliar waters here. But there’s some
indication that, unless an agreement is reached very soon, this could
be the summer not just of a WGA strike, but a _mega_-strike — or,
at least, a tense set of negotiations and a lot of uncertainty.

Here is what we know. The contracts for both the DGA, to which
Hollywood’s directors belong, and SAG-AFTRA, the union for actors
and voice actors, are up for renegotiation at the end of June. In
November 2022, the DGA sent a “pre-negotiation”
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to the AMPTP, seeking resolution ahead of bargaining on matters
similar in many ways to those at issue for the WGA — streaming,
data, and monetization. Had the AMPTP and the DGA reached an
agreement, or even an understanding, it would have set the tone for
the WGA’s negotiations. The AMPTP, however, reportedly rejected the
DGA’s proposal. Meanwhile, SAG-AFTRA released a statement in March
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demonstrates they’re concerned about and prepared to fight for
protections related to AI — particularly important for actors since
their likenesses and voices, which AI is increasingly able to imitate,
are their livelihoods.

The WGA is the first of the unions to negotiate this year, and
as some have noted
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the results of the first union’s negotiation tend to be passed along
to the others when they reach the bargaining table. That means the
AMPTP has a particularly keen interest in not ceding too much ground
to the WGA in their negotiations — and that, in turn, could mean a
longer strike if one begins, or even a pile-up if nobody’s happy
with demands. (In 2007, the last time the WGA was the first guild to
negotiate, the result was a 100-day strike.)

BUT FOR MANY MEMBERS OF HOLLYWOOD’S LABOR UNIONS, THE ISSUES AT HAND
ARE EXISTENTIAL

Of course, if the DGA, or SAG-AFTRA, or both were to go on strike, the
industry more or less would immediately shut down. Even existing
scripts couldn’t be shot. With the shutdowns and heightened
production demands of the acute pandemic era still barely out of the
rearview mirror, nobody wants that.

But for many members of Hollywood’s labor unions, the issues at hand
are existential, determining whether it will even be possible
to _have_ a Hollywood in the future, a business in which people can
work to create entertainment, share in the profits, and still afford
to pay their rent. It’s a particularly pivotal moment in the
business — and thus the stakes are extraordinarily high.

* Writers Guild of America
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* Strikes
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* television
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* Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers
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