The writers guild has called for a strike

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The strike comes at a time when there are increasing concerns about the profitability of streaming, and fears of a possible economic recession. Thousands of employees have been laid off by companies such as Disney and Warner Bros.

The union’s demands include increasing minimum wage rates and residuals payments, addressing the “abuses of mini-rooms,” and increased contributions to the union’s health and pension plan. The WGA also wants safeguards to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in scriptwriting, preventing it from being used to generate content or rewrite work already contracted by human writers.

“Driven in large part by the shift to streaming, writers are finding their work devalued in every part of the business,” the guild said in a bulletin to its members. “While company profits have remained high and spending on content has grown, writers are falling behind.”

Still, Alex O’Keefe, one of the writers of the Hulu series The Bear, says that the writers aren’t getting a fair cut of what studios are making. He told NPR that he was grateful to work on a show about the everyday struggles of Americans. I’ve seen a lack of care towards our working conditions and it’s happened at the same time. It makes it so difficult to produce the content that then makes them millions and millions of dollars.”

When she was a writer on Abbott Elementary, Britanni Nichols was able to use residuals she got when the show was re-aired. Each time, she got less than the original fee. Now, when her episodes are sold to the streamers, she gets just 5.5 percent of her writing fee. “You’re getting checks for $3, $7, $10. She told NPR that it’s not enough to put together a consistent lifestyle. It can be a real shock if it’s true. Sometimes a stack of checks is $0.07.

TV writers say that the streaming format means that series need to be kept to eight to 10 episodes a season, rather than the traditional 22 episode season on network TV.

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“I live a very working class existence and there’s nothing to be ashamed about it,” he says. “But yeah, I’ve reached a point that I don’t know how I can continue to survive in this business as it is.”

“It could be right back to a really sort of bad situation where I’m again, struggling to pay rent. And that shouldn’t be the case for someone who’s going to be a decade into their careers, working for an Emmy-winning television show,” she says. “I don’t think anyone would think about my career if they said that person still has to worry at this point.”

Other TV writers say they’re now being asked to work on spec in what are called “mini rooms”: They work alone on scripts that may or may not get greenlit, with no guarantee they’ll get to be in the official writer’s room even if the show does get picked up.

“We have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world. We could probably serve our members better than most,” Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, told investors during a recent earnings call. We have a lot of releases to take us into a long time.

The last WGA strike in 2007 and 2008 lasted 100 days and was credited with tipping California into a recession, causing a loss of around $2.1 billion to the state’s economy.

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The AMPTP provided a statement claiming it had offered “generous increases in compensation” that included an improvement in streaming residuals and had been willing to “improve that offer.” It was unwilling to compromise on the union’s demands for “mandatory staffing” and “duration of employment” however, saying these “primary sticking points” would require companies to staff shows with writers even if they’re not needed.

Tensions over contracts have been rising between the WGA and AMPTP for several years now. The last full-fledged contract negotiations took place in 2017, reaching a tentative agreement minutes after the previous contract expiration deadline had passed. The covid pandemic then made it difficult for both sides to negotiate terms for the following three-year contract agreement in 2020.