BURBANK, Calif.—Hundreds of writers across the Los Angeles area picketed at major entertainment studios again on May 17, calling for better wages and representation as the strike entered its third week—with no end in sight.
The strike began on May 2 after negotiations broke down between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios. Pickets have since become a daily sight at various studios owned by Amazon, CBS, The Walt Disney Co., Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. in cities including Burbank, Culver City, Hollywood, and Los Angeles.
The writers’ union is asking for a slate of changes that could cost studios $429 million a year in higher wages, more residual pay for streaming services, work guarantees, certain contracts for streaming shows, and protection from the emerging technology of artificial intelligence (AI).
“I think it’s going better than we could have ever hoped,” Hallie Haglund, a writer and member of the union’s negotiating committee, told The Epoch Times. “I keep thinking I’ll see the crowd wane, but it just keeps getting bigger.”
Crowds have steadily grown outside of The Walt Disney Co. studios in Burbank where writers were joined by members of the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) Wednesday.
“Since we started the strike, the [studios] have not made any effort to reach out to us to sit back down at the table,” Haglund said. “We’re waiting for them.”
The demands include establishing requirements for studios to allow writers to be more involved as multiple streaming services—such as Discovery Plus, Disney Plus, Netflix, and Paramount Plus—have cropped up in the past few years and have slowly squeezed writers out of production and eroded writers’ pay, according to the union.
“Too much now, in the streaming model, writers have been divorced from production,” Haglund said. “It’s an infrastructure that has worked for 50 years that’s now breaking down.”
In a weekly update for WGA members Tuesday, the union’s negotiating committee wrote that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers “refuses to negotiate a fair deal to address the existential crisis writers are facing.”
The latest offer by studios includes a 46-percent increase in residuals for streaming programs—to $114,000 per episode—over seven years. It also includes the highest first-year general wage increase offered to the WGA in more than 25 years, according to the alliance.
The studios have pushed back against some of the union’s demands for hiring quotas and employment guarantees on programs.
“If writing needs to be done, writers are hired, but these proposals require the employment of writers whether they’re needed for the creative process or not,” the alliance said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times. “While the WGA has argued that the proposal is necessary to ‘preserv[e] the writers’ room,’ it is in reality a hiring quota that is incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.”
Artificial Intelligence: Boom or Bane?
Another issue that remains unresolved is how to regulate the growing presence of AI in writing and production processes.
“AI has emerged as the existential threat to all creatives,” Jono Matt, a WGA captain, told The Epoch Times on May 16. The use of AI has grown in the entertainment industry as studios ramp up its use in production, graphics, voice-over, and in other areas. It’s been considered by many as a threat to writers, actors, voice actors, directors, teamsters, and others in the business.
The WGA is the first union to include conditions of AI use in labor negotiations, according to Matt.
“This is a remarkable fight, because we are going up against somebody bigger than the legacy film production companies that normally make film and TV shows,” Matt said.
Talks over regulating AI in the writing process have come to a halt. While the union is calling for an AI ban, the studios say the issue is something that requires a lot more discussion as the technology develops and they are committed to doing that.
For WGA comedy writer Caroline Renard, technology can never match what human beings can do in creative processes.
“The corporate people at the top want to get the same level of writing without actually paying writers,” Renard told The Epoch Times. “This is an art. I understand that corporations have their bottom line. They want to make profits and make money but being a director, an actor, a writer—that’s an art. You can’t replace that with machines.”
After spending six weeks attempting to negotiate a new contract, the WGA claimed the response from the studios was “wholly insufficient.”
According to a statement provided to The Epoch Times by the alliance, studios value the work of writers and recognize the controversies surrounding AI technologies.
No End in Sight
The strike has impacted television production. Late-night talk shows and “Saturday Night Live” are airing reruns. The “MTV Movie & TV Awards 2023” was canceled and replaced with a pre-taped event after celebrities refused to cross picket lines.The Daytime Emmy Awards ceremonies in June will also be postponed, and the Peabody Awards in Beverly Hills were canceled.
Meanwhile, the two sides have yet to set a date for further negotiations.
“It’s really up to the studios how long this lasts,” Haglund said. “We’re waiting for them to give us something to work with.”
Support in the entertainment industry is growing. The Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which represents around 160,000 performing artists and media professionals, voted to support the negotiations.
“Just as unity and solidarity among our members is the ultimate source of our power as a union, standing together with our sister unions multiplies our power and gives us all the strongest position to ensure our large corporate employers step up and treat fairly and justly the people who are the creative source of the industry’s success,” the union said in a statement.
Li, who only provided his last name, came out to the picket line at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank Tuesday to support the writers.
“I hope to one day be part of the guild, so I’m very passionate about this,” said Li, an incoming writer. “If I’m ever going to be part of the guild, I want to be sure that everyone is getting fair pay.”
At Disney Studios, Denisse Espitia served Mexican fare to picketers. Nonna’s Kitchen, a catering business in Sherman Oaks, donated food and time to support them.
“We think that everybody should be entitled to their own worth when it comes to the wages,” Espitia told The Epoch Times. “We think there’s a lot of people who get kind of looked over. We want to make sure that we honor them.”
Economic Costs
The WGA estimates the work stoppage is costing the California economy about $30 million a day, according to Deadline, an online media outlet specializing in Hollywood entertainment news.“The writers’ strike is very visible here in Burbank,” Jamie Keyser, CEO of the Burbank Chamber of Commerce, told The Epoch Times. “Media is central to our city’s economy and we don’t know what the long-term impact will be or how long it will last. We hope that all parties involved will continue to talk and work together so we can come to an equitable resolution sooner rather than later.”
“Everybody deserves to be paid fairly,” Zaslav said. “So, our No. 1 focus is let’s try and get this resolved. Let’s do it in a way that the writers feel that they’re valued, which they are, and they’re compensated fairly.”
