After nearly five months picketing, chanting and marching nationwide, the Writers Guild of America strike against studio greed resulted in a tentative agreement that is now being voted on by the union’s membership. On Sept. 27, the WGA-West Board and WGA East Council voted to end the strike after winning concessions that would earn its members an estimated $233 million more per year than the previous agreement. This is almost three times higher than the deal that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers initially offered.
Starting in May, the WGA strike was one of the many historic labor struggles this year to kick off “Hot Labor Summer,” a phrase coined to describe this year’s revitalization in the labor movement, a continuation from the 2021 “Strike-tober.” As a result of low unemployment, the housing crisis and unfettered corporate greed, workers were more willing to fight back and use their bargaining power against the bosses in unprecedented ways since the start of the pandemic.
This 148-day writer’s strike was an existential fight against Hollywood studios on a scale unlike the previous WGA strikes of 1988 and 2008. With the emergence of new technology and eroding working conditions due to streaming, this was a battle to stop the studios from morphing Hollywood into another “gig economy.” And on these issues, the WGA resoundingly came out on top, making massive progress in what will be an ongoing fight for years to come.
The WGA won greater regulations on so-called “mini-rooms,” which include minimum staffing and minimum lengths of employment for TV writers rooms. This means a minimum number of writers must be hired and guaranteed work depending on the length of the season ordered. For instance, for a series with up to six episodes, three writers must be hired. This guarantees that writers working on a show that is greenlit or pre-greenlit do not have to immediately worry about lining up their next gig or making an impossible deadline in order to make ends meet. On top of that, the WGA won minimum employment during production, which means mid-level writers must be kept on production for a minimum time period, an experience that is essential for career advancement and for rejoining the writers room to the production process.
For the first time ever, the WGA won new viewership-based streaming residuals for its members. This means when a television show or movie is massively successful on any streaming service, the writers reap the benefits of its success and receive an extra bonus payment from the studios. Since the industry was transformed by the 2007 launch of Netflix’s streaming feature, writers have not benefited from residuals in the same way. Unlike regular broadcast television, the streamers, i.e., Netflix, Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, etc., have not been required to reveal their viewership data. Therefore, the compensation writers received in streaming residuals was fixed and significantly lower.
While the new contract won’t require streamers to disclose that data to the public, it will give the WGA more streaming transparency and put writers in a better position to negotiate against their employer. While this is a huge and important victory, it’s important to note that Hollywood streamers have already formed a united lobbying front in the midst of their own defeat, demonstrating why writers must continue to stay organized and militant in their union even post contract ratification.
Additionally, writing teams — writers who work in groups of two or more — will no longer be forced to split their health care and pension contributions as if they were a single person. WGA members have typically had to make a certain amount of money annually in order to qualify for health care benefits, making it more difficult for writing duos and teams to qualify for benefits. Under the new deal, every writer will be treated as an individual, making it easier for them to meet the minimum needed to qualify for essential benefits.
Artificial intelligence
Perhaps one of the most landmark achievements that will set the stage for future negotiations across organized labor is the WGA’s victory on how to regulate artificial intelligence. Back in May, the employers rejected the WGA’s initial proposal to prohibit AI programs from writing and rewriting scripted material. But through the steadfast, militant character of the strike, WGA members have a first-of-its-kind contractual protection against its use in the writing process.
Writers can now decide how and when to use new technology in their own work, if the studio they are working for consents, and the studios cannot require writers to use AI software, e.g., ChatGPT, when performing writing services. This is a historic victory for all workers because it puts new technology in the hands of the workers to benefit their lives rather than the bosses, who want endless profit at the expense of the workers. In addition, if any materials given to a writer have been generated by AI or incorporate AI-generated material it must be disclosed to the writer by the studio. AI-generated written material is not considered literary material, source material or assigned material. The WGA also reserved the right to “assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law,” signaling the union’s readiness for the long fight ahead over new technology. As with any collective bargaining agreement, the most difficult part of this fight on AI will be its enforcement.
In November 2022, the popularization of artificial intelligence through the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT large language model inaugurated a new era in the digital revolution. The advent of such a powerful tool has changed the trajectory of many industries. Many astute observers of AI have known about the likes of generative AI engines being developed for a few years now and have been waiting for the announcement of a “generative pre-training transformer” (GPT) like this to experiment with. Indeed, the WGA has been one such observer of this new era of text-generating AI programs.
As they have correctly surmised, in the hands of the capitalists, text-generating AI programs would be used to outsource their stories to the machines. It is so much cheaper to feed an AI program hundreds of thousands of film and television scripts as raw data from which to generate new stories than to pay union writers for their own scripts. In other words, the WGA is at the forefront of a new struggle that will undoubtedly unfold over the course of our lifetime and affect the entire working class.
While the WGA’s strength and steadfastness was a decisive factor in this victory, the unprecedented cross-union solidarity within the entertainment industry and beyond provided essential fuel to this summer’s historic labor upsurge. Both the Teamsters and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees unions that represent Hollywood’s “below-the-line” film and television crews were instrumental in shutting down productions. Other union workers refused to work where WGA members were picketing, giving the WGA more leverage in their fight. On July 14, 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild joined the writers in the streets after deadlocked negotiations with the AMPTP, initiating a historic two-union strike that effectively shutdown Hollywood as an industry.
The WGA’s struggle represents a new shift in the balance of forces within the entertainment industry. With both WGA and SAG’s strategy of pattern bargaining for similar proposals, the writers gave leverage to the actors in their negotiations but also forced the studios to set up AI proposals to IATSE and the Teamsters during their contract negotiations next year. The unprecedented unity and solidarity of these workers has been undoubtedly one of the greatest victories of this strike and will be a galvanizing moment going forward for future union struggles. These victories will not only fundamentally improve the working conditions across the entertainment industry and beyond, but now make it more difficult for the studios to pit Hollywood workers against each other as they have always tried to.
The strength and determination of the WGA membership might have been tested during the strike. Now their resiliency will have to endure a much longer fight against the inevitable future assaults by employers wielding new technologies in a way that threatens working people’s livelihoods. Hollywood workers are fighting some of the opening stages of a new existential battle in the overall class war. A labor contract is only as strong as its enforcement, and the introduction of AI in the workplace opens a new struggle around automation. As we have seen countless times during this Hot Labor Summer, only when workers fight can they determine their own destiny and win.
