The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
The Hollywood writers’ strike is over — and they won big
Here’s what’s coming in the WGA’s new contract.
In case you're also interested in what's actually been agreed on...
The exact language of the contract is yet to be released. But from the WGA summary, it appears the union was successful in its effort. The MOA includes increases to minimum wage and compensation, increased pension and health fund rates, improvements to terms for length of employment and size of writing teams (which had been shrinking drastically in recent years), and better residuals (which are like royalties), including foreign streaming residuals.
The MOA also lays out terms for artificial intelligence, with an agreement that doesn’t prevent writers or productions from making use of generative AI but prohibits using software to reduce or eliminate writers and their pay. “A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services,” the MOA states.
Additionally, “the WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law” — a major issue given many authors’ recent discovery that their work is being used to train AI owned by Meta and other companies.
Those are some great accomplishments!
Are there any points on which they had to concede or compromise?From the wording it sounds like they only got foreign residuals on streaming, not US. Given that one of the biggest points of the strike was that writers weren’t getting payed residuals for streaming (which is increasingly the main market) it does seems like a fairly big concession.
Admittedly the biggest issue was that streaming services are shockingly opaque about viewership numbers. There doesn’t really seem to be an industry standard for what counts as a “view”. Does someone scrolling past a video and it auto playing 2 seconds count as a view, does someone watching 90% through than going to the next episode count as a view?
To agree to paying residuals on shows would require admitting to what people are actually watching on their services. They really seem to not want to do that. Probably because most of what they’re hyping up or promoting is failing in real terms and they want to keep massaging the numbers.
So the compromise is they’ll do it for exports but not domestic. Maybe because they can waffle on the reasons for failure in the foreign markets but it is harder to do that domestically.
I'm sure the companies didn't give them as much money as they originally asked for. Unions usually expect to concede partially on those numbers and start at a higher negotiation number.
It's hard to tell whether the executives actually believed they could use LLMs to replace writers or if they had seen the possible results of that even one time and pretended they were considering doing that as a negotiation tactic. Hollywood executives are notoriously out of touch and delusional about art so they may have been serious.
I bet they saw the difference between "how much we could make from throwing LLM shit at users" vs. "how much users will pay for actual human writer stuff", and conceded some of the projected difference to the writers.
I wouldn't recommend the writers to get all cozy with that, though; each year the difference is going to be less, each year the executives will reassess it, until the LLMs will get to write "good enough" shitty stuff that the audiences will squint and pay... and if the writers don't get serious with moving their position to close the benefit gap, at some point they'll find there is no gap anymore.
this is a pretty good article covering the contract and noting that it's only an agreement with WGA (not SAG-AFTA) but i want to correct one point they make:
No. TV and film production doesn’t happen overnight, and while it will likely ramp up rapidly once the actors come back to work, the lengthy strike has caused inevitable delays and hiccups.
the delays have been caused by greedy execs who were literally hoping to starve their writers out instead of granting them contractual protections and paying them fairly
the execs have caused these delays and ultimately cost their corporations far more than what they'd have lost just agreeing to this contract in the first place
don't forget that point. everything sucks because of shitty execs. nothing but greed and reluctance to acknowledge worker power was stopping them from coming to the table four months ago
Good for them! Hopefully more Americans take notice
Well done!! Strike works! Collective action works!!
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The strike officially ended in the wee hours of Wednesday, September 27, and the union’s membership will begin their vote on Monday, October 2.
President Joe Biden, who is set to join striking auto workers on their picket line on Tuesday, issued a statement applauding the writers’ tentative deal.
“There simply is no substitute for employers and employees coming together to negotiate in good faith toward an agreement that makes a business stronger and secures the pay, benefits, and dignity that workers deserve,” he said.
TV and film production doesn’t happen overnight, and while it will likely ramp up rapidly once the actors come back to work, the lengthy strike has caused inevitable delays and hiccups.
It seems unlikely that movies like Dune: Part Two, which was pushed into 2024, will be pulled back onto the 2023 schedule once actors and writers are permitted by their unions to promote work again.
For now, though, the focus is likely to be on recovery, in an industry that’s already reeling from years of potentially bad financial decisions, Covid delays, and existential struggles.
Saved 85% of original text.
The American workforce is only 10% unionized.