The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. The union representing about 11,500 writers of film, television, radio, and online media announced a walkout as their last three-year contract expired on May 1, explaining that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this negotiation.”
At the center of the dispute are deteriorating working conditions stemming from the rise of streaming services and the boom in made-for-television production. The union’s proposal, sent to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, includes both traditional demands like higher minimum wages and unique claims concerning “viewership-based streaming residuals” and the regulation of artificial intelligence usage.
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Alex O’Keefe, who worked on the hit FX show The Bear, complained, “I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.” Similarly, Stephanie McFarlane, a writer for BET+, told the New York Times that she just wants her “income to be a livable wage,” since “right now, it’s like a gig economy.”
Such statements have a long history in the film industry. Thinking of themselves as workers, screenwriters, actors, directors, and many others in the film industry stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ’40s have insisted that filmmaking is a form of labor and resisted attempts to categorize it just as entertainment or art. Screenwriter Philip Dunne, who worked for 20th Century Fox, argued that no matter how “glorified” his work was, the movie writer is an “employee, subject to the directions, and in some cases the apparent lunacies, of the studio executives.” Joan Crawford thought that Hollywood actors “have jobs the same as any girl in a ten-cent store, and we do what we’re told.” James Cagney suggested that he was “just like a shipping clerk. I was just a salaried employee.”
Hollywood workers felt entitled to fair labor standards and the protections guaranteed by US labor law. And they fought for those rights. In fact, the first battle waged by Hollywood scribes was for their right to form a union.
At the height of the New Deal, screenwriters, actors, and directors, like millions of other US workers, joined the ranks of organized labor. While actors and directors adopted a more conservative, craft-focused unionism, they nonetheless raised their own standards. And writers proved to be comparatively militant, quicker to strike to defend and expand their rights on the job.
That kind of worker consciousness was as crucial then as it is now. Despite attempts to focus on the glitz and glamor of their industry, time and again Hollywood workers have been compelled to turn the attention back to the sphere of production and labor rights.