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'Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work' Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed the National Writers Union's Eric Thurm about the Hollywood writers' strike for the May 26, 2023, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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More Perfect Union: Poll: The Public Overwhelmingly Supports the Writers’ Strike

More Perfect Union (5/22/23 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: Whenever workers find their employment conditions, or those of their coworkers, so difficult or dangerous, so precarious, or simply so unfair that they make the decision to withhold their labor in order to effect change, it's a big deal, sometimes a life-altering one for individuals, and sometimes a sea change for an industry. But folks who have never been in that situation don't always understand it, and some don't try.

What looks like public support ([link removed]) for the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America may stem from the fact that it centers on the people who write the TV shows and movies that help many of us get through this thing called life.

But does that mean it includes an understanding of the role that power, and the balance of power, plays in all labor actions? That could definitely be an added benefit, no matter the particular outcomes here.

Eric Thurm is the campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union ([link removed]) , and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project ([link removed]) . His explainer on the writer's strike ([link removed]) appeared recently in GQ, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Thurm.

Eric Thurm: Thank you. Happy to be here.
GQ: All About the Writers Strike: What Does the WGA Want and Why Are They Fighting So Hard for it?

GQ (5/5/23 ([link removed]) )

JJ: Labor actions in various industries are definitely perceived differently, by the broader public and by the news media that report on them. I think that difference stems, in part, from just a lack of consistent worker-centered journalism generally, but also from this idea of just, well, if you make more money than I do, I can't see your beef.

In the case of writers, it goes up a notch; as with athletes, "You make money doing something fun." It becomes almost, “How dare you?”

And there's a lot wrong with that, but part of it is this laser focus on money. Pay is central, often, and why wouldn't it be? That's the literal currency of valuing work. But labor actions are virtually always about something more than that.

So take your time, if you would, and break down, particularly, those behind-the-scenes industry specifics that we as outsiders might not see, but should see, as the central issues in what looks like an important strike.

ET: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there are a couple of things that are driving the strike. One of them is that, for all that there is a popular perception that writers get paid extremely well, that increasingly is not the case.

And in the same way that it is, like you mentioned, for athletes or for actors or for a lot of other highly visible professions, there is a very small number of people at the top who basically have a winning lottery ticket, and just get paid extremely well.

But in order to even have a chance at winning that, you have to spend a lot of time in the trenches, with much worse working conditions, often even less pay, with a lot less stability, and in particular, an original source of stability, and the reason that a lot of people have been able to make a career as writers is because of something called residuals, which basically is an amount of money that you get paid when something that you worked on and are credited on gets used in another context.
Slate: This Writers’ Strike Isn’t a Rerun

Slate (5/4/23 ([link removed]) )

So that's why, if you ever have heard people talk about syndication, or getting to a hundred episodes ([link removed]) : If you wrote, let's say, one episode of Friends, and when that gets to the point where it just is on TBS all the time, you get a check every time it airs.

And that functions as an additional bit of stability, particularly because even people that have been successful often have very long periods without working, just because of the nature of the industry.

And that safety net, I think as safety nets for people in all industries are being slowly dismantled, or as bosses are trying to dismantle them, that is a safety net that a lot of writers don't have anymore, especially because the residual payments for streaming are basically nothing ([link removed]) .

So in theory, you could write something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are watching on Netflix or Hulu or something, and you will see no additional money from that.

JJ: I think viewers understand that we're watching media differently today. I can watch a whole series that took months or years to create in a weekend. And I'm like, well, that's that.

As media critics, we don't blame the people, but there are things that we don't see that could be useful for us to understand. And I think residuals is definitely one of those.

And then, also, you write about something called a mini-room, like it has to do with the pipeline of how you grow and get work as a writer, that I don't see, just watching TV, but is very meaningful for the quality of what I see.
LA: The Writer’s Guild of America Strike: An Explainer

Los Angeles (5/5/23 ([link removed]) )

ET: Totally. And that's something that if you, like me, are a big nerd about this sort of thing, you start to notice people's names popping up in different contexts and credits of things. And if you pay a lot of attention, you start to see that pipeline. But for a lot of people, it definitely isn't visible.

So basically a mini-room essentially means a writer's room ([link removed]) that has fewer writers in it, and is convened for less time. There are supposed to be basic minimums in the WGA contract, and there are the minimum basic agreements ([link removed]) that stipulate if you are making this type of TV show, you have to have this number of writers, and they have to be employed for X amount of time.

And that is also an additional source of stability, but it also is how people learn the business, and how people learn how to produce, or how to eventually make their own shows.

So if you are the new writer, which in a lot of respects is still kind of a misnomer, because by the time somebody gets staffed on their first room, if they're working in TV, it's very possible, if not likely, that they have been grinding away at a lot of other things for a long time.

But once you get that credit, you spend time around the showrunners and the people that are more senior to you, who know a little bit more about the industry, and you observe them.

A lot of the time writers will go to set to supervise on episodes that they wrote, which can be really important for a lot of reasons, both because it is useful training for the writer, but also because a lot of decisions get made on a snap basis on set, and the writer is the person who knows where the show is going, where the show has been.
Vince Gilligan

Vince Gilligan (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

I think people have this assumption that everybody knows everything about the overall plan of the show at any given moment, but if you're the director or the cinematographer or even some of the actors, you don't know that. And so things that might feel disjointed to people, if you're watching something that, for example, has a mini-room, would probably actually be much better and make more sense if there had been a writer on set to be like, “Actually, this is where we're taking it. Let's make a decision that's more in line with the overall creative direction.”

And that also is how people learn all the ins and outs of this stuff. And without having that, there just is no way for people to get better at their craft, or to develop any of the skills that people need to have in order to make any of the stuff that we like.

Just to give one example: Vince Gilligan ([link removed]) , who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and this stuff that people really like, worked for quite a while on The X-Files, and wrote a bunch of episodes, and produced some of the episodes, and then eventually ran this very brief spinoff ([link removed]) .

And you can really see how those careers develop. People don't emerge out of nowhere knowing how to run the small army that is a TV production.

JJ: It also sounds just a little bit like a lot of other workplaces, where management says, “Ooh, if you work 40 hours, you get benefits....so we're just going to book two people for 20 hours.” It sounds like evading valuing people.

And one of the things that you wrote in the GQ piece was, "Emerging technologies will continue to be a tool for companies seeking to reduce the amount they pay workers (or to get rid of them entirely)."

And I just think that's another issue where people are kind of shadow-informed, halfway informed. It's not that writers hate technology, obviously, or hate AI, or don't understand it, but it's another part of the power relationship here.
Eric Thurm

Eric Thurm: "Essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out."

ET: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the piece is that technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts, because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.

And that dates back to when home video ([link removed]) emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.

And so of course the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it's hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.

And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying as much as possible to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work ([link removed]) , into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.
WaPo: The WGA strike is part of a recurring pattern when technology changes

Washington Post (5/30/23 ([link removed]) )

And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people's work—I saw someone recently describe ([link removed]) it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.

I think that's something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.

Literally, just the day before we're having this conversation, HBO Max rebranded as just Max, and apparently they have changed the way ([link removed]) that movies and TV and everything show up on their site, so that it just says “creators,” and that will include producers and directors and some other people, and you don't really know who did what, rather than saying, this was directed by this person, and this was written by this person.

And I think that that attempt to obfuscate things, and make it harder to understand the people who are actually creating something, is the entire point of how the studios are trying to handle this, and part of why they're so interested in AI.
Counterspin: Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’

CounterSpin (4/7/23 ([link removed]) )

JJ: I think a lot of folks would actually be maybe a little surprised, and certainly disheartened, to know that bosses in creative industries act a lot like bosses in every other industry. The response has been, essentially, you're lucky to have a job, you ungrateful whelp. There's a line of people just like you I could hire tomorrow. And then, also, I thought we were all friends!

This is the line that Starbucks gives baristas ([link removed]) who go on strike. There's a lot of similarities across industry that might be more important than the differences. And yet nobody asks the CEOs, “Aren't you a creative? Isn't this a labor of love for you?”

This sort of general societal understanding, which I blame news media a lot for, is that a strike is an interruption in a natural order of things, and the workers who go on strike are to blame for any disruptions or harms that come from it.

ET: Yeah, I think that that's definitely true. And you could have long conversations, or write whole books, about the attempt of capital and bosses and corporations to make their profit-extracting mechanisms look like these very cuddly or friendly things.

I think there's, like you're saying, a real direct line to bosses saying, “Oh, we're all a family here, and we don't want a union"—that's somehow a third party, even though it's just the workers—"coming between us and our little family.”
Deadline: WGA’s Minimum Staffing Demands Were A Key Sticking Point In Failed Contract Talks, But It Wouldn’t Be The First Guild To Require Them

Deadline (5/8/23 ([link removed]) )

And even in the context of these negotiations, one of the things that the writers are asking for is these more concrete minimums for staffing, in terms of numbers of writers and the amount of time that people are in rooms. And the studio response was to say, this is an unfair or arbitrary quota that is, and I think this is the direct quote ([link removed]) , “counter to the creative nature of our industry.”

And it's like, OK, you're not the people making the creative decisions. And if you were, right, I would love to see what these people came up with, if they had to try to write a whole season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something.

And it's funny, I think that that actually is something that comes out of, or is impressed into a lot of, not just news media, but entertainment media. I don't really know exactly how to fully extricate these things, but I do think that it's quite telling that one of the dominant forms of media, that makes the most money and gets the most push behind it, is the workplace sitcom, the central thesis of which is that your coworkers are supposed to be your family.

And it's extremely rare to see anything like that, where anybody really talks about the material conditions of people in the workplace.
Jacobin: The Red Scare Scarred the Left — But Couldn’t Kill It

Jacobin (3/11/22 ([link removed]) )

JJ: That’s a great point.

ET: That's a kind of bugbear of mine. And I am cautiously optimistic about what will come out of the strike, and what will come out of what I think is a much more increased labor consciousness among people, both in these creative industries, but also more broadly.

When I was growing up, and I think that for quite a long time, the dominant Hollywood depiction of labor is, oh, union bosses, corruption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that we've heard a million times.

And I think that in a lot of respects, that really is a lingering effect of the Red Scare ([link removed]) , and a lot of purges of people in creative fields. And it does feel like there's been at least some recovery, or attempts to change that.

Even something like Riverdale, this adaptation of a previously existing IP that's a kind of silly CW teen soap, had a really fantastic subplot ([link removed]) in one of the most recent seasons, where Archie from Archie Comics forms a union, and they have all these conversations about solidarity, and about the importance of music and labor formation, and this stuff that I would never have expected to see even two or three years ago.
WaPo's Megan McArdle: The Hollywood writers strike could have lasting impact

Washington Post (5/16/23 ([link removed]) )

JJ: I'm going to ask you one final and also hopeful question on that. I did want to just kind of cram in this Washington Post piece ([link removed]) that fits this template that we're talking about, that was talking about the last Hollywood writers' strike, which you referenced, in 2007–08.

And the Post piece said that that strike

cost writers and other workers an estimated $772 million, while knock-on effects did more than $2 billion in damage to the broader California economy. Promising shows were hamstrung, promising movies were shot with half-finished scripts, promising careers were cut short.

And if that wasn't enough, the piece went on to say that because of those darn strikers, TV was forced to go to reality shows and, yep, Donald Trump. So I guess the idea was, maybe think about that when you're supporting striking workers?

I don't even think this piece was meant to be mean, but it was such the template of “the labor action causes damage, the labor action causes hurt, and what went before it was somehow not causing damage, and not causing hurt.” And so you're supposed to be mad at the interrupters.

And I just want to attach that, though, to the idea that we know that many journalists have internalized the idea that they aren't workers, they're independent contractors. They're just individuals doing a job, and unions are kind of icky, and who needs solidarity until it happens to you. All of which is just to say that you see change there, besides the landscape, you see change in that mindset among writers, among journalists, a change in the idea that, no, we're not workers, no, we don't need to band together. You see something different happening there.
NYT: Gawker Media Employees Vote to Form a Union, and the Bosses Approve

New York Times (6/4/15 ([link removed]) )

ET: Yeah, definitely. That's something that has been really heartening for me. I've been in and around digital media for a little over a decade now, which feels really wild to say, but the beginning of that period, I was in college, and I had no real understanding of a lot of these issues. And I definitely, I think if you had asked me, I really did feel, oh, I'm lucky to be here.

In the intervening years, and especially since Gawker unionized ([link removed]) in, I think, 2015, the rush of solidarity, and the proliferation of unions across digital media, has been really powerful.

And I think that that has been both enormously meaningful for the people that are doing the work, and then getting a lot of people who, like I think you said, would not have ordinarily thought of themselves as workers to see themselves as such.

It also has created this broader awareness that I think has led to much better journalism in the last few years, even places like Vice or the Washington Post or Business Insider, and these people who were able to get jobs where they can cover this stuff.

And I think that there are a lot of reasons why, a lot of lines you can draw between the strength of these unions and the ability to produce this kind of coverage. But that also has led, I think, to a much stronger sense of worker solidarity across the industry.
Join the Freelance Solidarity Project

Freelance Solidarity Project ([link removed])

So I am really involved in the Freelance Solidarity Project ([link removed]) , which organizes freelancers across digital media as a division of the National Writers Union. We have done a lot to organize in parallel with, and supporting, people who are facing similarly precarious conditions.

And I think that a lot of people, who before would have been like, “I exist above things, and I would never think of myself as being in the same position as someone who has a gig-based job,” I think now people are a lot more aware of the similarity of those positions, and a lot more thoughtful about what's driving that precarity, and what we can do to stop it, which also is something I think that you see as the WGA strike plays out right now.

A lot of people who are unionized with IATSE, which is the union that represents most below-the-line ([link removed](BTL)%20refers,or%20leadership%20on%20the%20project.) crew and production staff, a lot of IATSE workers have refused to cross picket lines. And all of these things are part of what makes production possible, and it's part of why so many shows have had to shut down.

The economic damage that you reference, that this Washington Post article is talking about, not only is it caused by the bosses, but it also is the direct result of people being able to stand in solidarity and say, we are not going to allow this thing to continue to happen.

And it's been really heartening to me to see so many people say, “I am so amazed by the Teamsters standing with us. If they have to go out this summer, we're going to be right there.” I think that's so great.

JJ: It sounds like you're saying, better solidarity among workers leads also to better creations and better work.

ET: I sure hope so.

JJ: We've been speaking with Eric Thurm. He's campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union; they’re online at NWU.org ([link removed]) . He's a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, FreelanceSolidarity.org ([link removed]) , and you can still find his explainer on the ongoing writer strike at GQ.com ([link removed]) . Eric Thurm, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ET: Thank you.
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