The Writer’s Strike, Explained

For the last month or so, the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike. This is certainly not the first time that you’ve heard about it; it has been all over the news, and has been going on for quite some time. There does not seem to be any end in sight, however. Television shows are going to become more and more affected, which in turn means more and more people are going to be curious about what this all means. 

Image: Valerie Macon via NPR

The strike began on May 2nd of this year, which means that it has been going on for 44 days already. It started when the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) were unable to agree on a fair deal by May 1. This may seem pretty long for a strike, but it pales in comparison to the length of the last writer’s strike, which happened in 2007-08 and lasted for 100 days. The longest writer’s strike in American television history happened in 1988 and lasted 153 days. 

Screenwriters across the world have organized a ‘Day of Solidarity’ with the American screenwriters on strike. They organized rallies in dozens of major cities in 35 countries across the globe yesterday, June 14, to show their support of the WGA. The adamant resistance to crossing the picket line of writers all over the world shows how united the community of a professional field can be. This global support is somewhat unprecedented, but the unification of writers and writer’s unions is increasingly relevant given the globalization of content and international outsourcing and outposts of companies like Amazon Video and Netflix. 

Image: Alex Kent via Vanity Fair

So, why are the writers striking? The main issue is a dispute over residuals from platform streaming media. Residual checks are money that writers, actors, and other members of the production team get paid when content is re-aired, resold, or otherwise repackaged. Back in the day of network television, this meant that every time an episode of a show was re-aired on any network, the people involved in making it got a check. This is why syndication was such a marker of success; getting a show syndicated meant that multiple networks had the right to air old episodes, which in turn meant dozens of residual checks over years and years. 

Now, however, things are done a bit differently. Streaming services pay one time, fixed residuals that do not account for viewership numbers or any type of movement between streaming services. Writers in the WGA want a deal that more similarly resembles the residuals system of network TV, ensuring that they are fairly compensated for their labor. 

Image: Stephen Lovekin via Vulture

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the increasingly difficult conditions that television and film writers have to deal with. The WGA strike is also opposing something that in the industry is called “mini-rooms,” which basically means that fewer writers are hired for less time and with lower pay, then put into a room and expected to come up with quality content. Of course, talented writers can still put together quality content in situations like these, but they are given much fewer resources to do their best work. Additionally, writers have less and less access to other aspects of the production process, leaving much fewer opportunities for advancement into other parts of the industry, like production and showrunning. In turn, this means that fewer people will be left at the top to create shows, and television creation will become more of an oligopoly of the elite than it already is. 

Image: Frederic J. Brown via NPR

The last thing that writers want is a fair deal when it comes to AI. Writers are demanding that new AI technology is used only in research or facilitating ideas, and not script writing. The issue here is not simply that using AI to write scripts would take away writing jobs; the fact is, even if AI could write a decent script, it would only be able to do so because it had been fed hundreds of scripts written by real writers who would then go uncompensated for this work. 

There has been an explosion in TV production over the last decade. Unfortunately, writers, actors, and other parts of the crew don’t seem to have benefitted from this at all. Instead, studios and investors seem to be seeing all of the profits. WGA writers have proven with their strikes over the years that they are willing to hold out indefinitely for a fair deal. It is simply unclear how long it will take for studios to feel forced to give it to them.