[ The contract that the writers are striking for could set a
powerful precedent that AI must work for people, rather than being
used to marginalize people to juice profits. ]
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THIS HISTORIC WRITERS’ STRIKE MATTERS FOR EVERYONE – NOT JUST
HOLLYWOOD  
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Hamilton Nolan
May 6, 2023
Guardian
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_ The contract that the writers are striking for could set a powerful
precedent that AI must work for people, rather than being used to
marginalize people to juice profits. _

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There is nothing particularly novel about thinking to yourself, “You
know, my job used to be pretty decent. Now, I’m working harder and
the money is getting scarcer. What happened?” You might think this,
in 2023, as a college professor or a cab driver or a journalist or a
factory worker. This is America – our entire economy is built on
making millions of jobs worse, in order to make a few people very
rich.

What would be remarkable is if – when you realized that your
once-good job was being made worse in order to satisfy the profit
hunger of some faraway investment banker – you were able to actually
do something about it. That, in our nation, would be news. That would
be something for everyone to cheer for. The plain old workers standing
up against enormous companies to stop the process that is turning
their careers into execrable “gigs”. Is it a fairy tale? No, my
friends. Welcome to the Great Writers Strike of 2023.

You may have noticed, if you turned on your TV last night, that the
late night shows have suddenly stopped. That’s because, on Tuesday,
the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike. The people who
write all the TV shows and movies ain’t writing. So the new TV shows
and movies ain’t gonna get made. Not until a fair contract with the
AMPTP, a coalition of major studios, is reached. After weeks of
intense negotiation, the two sides aren’t close. How far apart are
they? The WGA’s total asks would come to
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a year; the studios’ current offer stands at $86m a year.Lol.

What makes this strike notable is that the WGA is one of a relatively
small number of unions in America that actually has power at an
industrial scale. With few exceptions, if you are a working
screenwriter, you are in the Writers Guild. (I am a WGA member, but we
journalists are not technically on strike.) If studios want people to
write their movies and shows, those people will be members of the
union. Unlike in most industries, where union members make up a
minority of the workers, in screenwriting, the work force _is_ the
union. Period. That sets up a balance of power between labor and
capital that is rare in this country. Hollywood may be a louche
mythology factory that idolizes materialist decadence, but from a
labor organizing perspective, they’re a damn role model. Every part
of Hollywood is unionized, and those unions make sure their workers
get a fair share of the abundant proceeds of the entertainment
industry. That’s why not just big film stars, but character actors
and directors and electricians and writers can all make a decent
living in TV and movies. Because their unions organized everyone, and
demanded it. That is the _only _reason. And, for decades, the
Hollywood studios and their financial backers have been trying to
change that annoying fact.

Some screenwriters are rich. But the average screenwriter is, like
many people, just trying to hang on to a solid middle-class job. Their
industry has been upended by technological changes like streaming; the
old, ad-centric revenue model is dying, and the writers are trying to
win a contract that reflects the current reality of the business.
They’re not looking for Shangri-La – their contract demands
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fair pay and health care and a pension, while the companies are trying
to take advantage of the changing industry to morph screenwriting into
a more part-time, disposable, cheaper form of gig work. Bosses would
like those of us with worse pay and benefits to be jealous of these
screenwriters. In fact, they are champions of the idea that jobs
should not suck. That if you are making a ton of money for your
bosses, then you should be getting a fair piece yourself. That was
once called “the American dream”. Now it’s called
“unreasonable demands”. Either way, labor unions are the only
remaining way to get it.

The WGA is also asking for contract language that ensures that AI is
used only as a tool, and not as a full-on replacement for human
writers. The fact that the studios haven’t agreed to that is a
tell–a dark indication of corporate America’s barely concealed
enthusiasm for the idea of maximizing the use of algorithms in their
ongoing quest to push labor costs down to zero. There is virtually no
chance that government regulators will move fast enough to get ahead
of the rapid spread of AI in the workplace. Unions are the only
institutions with the legitimate ability to build guardrails for the
humans. In this sense, the contract that the writers are striking for
could set a powerful precedent that AI must work _for_ people,
rather than being used to marginalize people in order to juice
profits.

This strike matters for everyone. The story of the past half century
of American society has been this: declining labor power, rising
corporate power, rising inequality, collapsing democratic
institutions. Reviving the power of working people, through organized
labor, is the key to stopping our big national plummet to hell. A
profitable, high-profile industry with enough union density to
actually have a fair fight between workers and employers? That is an
uncommon and precious thing. The Writers Guild has it. They are
fighting to show that humans, who create stuff, cannot always and
everywhere be steamrolled by the demands of spreadsheets and stock
markets. Their win will be meaningful to you, and me, and everyone
whose job seems to always be becoming more of a grind.

Think of an inspirational movie. Gladiator, for example. “Whatever
comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if
we work together,” Russell Crowe says
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fellow wretches in the arena. “If we stay together, we survive.”

Those words were written by a screenwriter. And they were speaking
from experience.

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Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times

* Writers Guild of America
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* artificial intelligence
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