Alex Blagg has worked in television for more than 10 years. He’s cocreated TV shows like Comedy Central’s @midnight, sold feature projects, worked as a staff writer on scripted TV and in writers rooms (including on Workaholics), and has won Emmys. And still, he doesn’t feel like he can earn a stable living as a writer. It’s “kind of head spinning,” he says, how quickly what was once a solid career—if you were lucky enough to break into the field, of course—has crumbled.
“It felt like there was a path to sustained success and stability, and to be able to have a middle-class or upper-middle-class life. Even if you weren’t one of the top A-list showrunners, you could have a career,” he says. “And it just feels like that proposition has become more and more difficult, for more and more people.”
Blagg is one of many writers who have recently voted “yes” to a Strike Authorization Vote through the Writers Guild of America (WGA), a labor union representing TV and film writers; Writers Guild of America West, based in Los Angeles, has about 20,000 members. (Fast Company’s editorial newsroom is unionized through the Writers Guild of America East).
The WGA’s contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers—a trade association that represents more than 350 Hollywood film- and TV-production companies, including Paramount, Warner Bros., Disney, Netflix, and Apple+—expires on May 1. The union has been negotiating for big changes, primarily to the pay structure for writers, arguing that the prevalence of streaming has decimated writers’ pay.
Without an agreement in sight, though, the WGA has asked its membership to take a Strike Authorization Vote, voting “yes” to allow a strike. That vote opened to union members on April 11 and closes on April 17; if passed—as is widely expected—WGA leadership could have more leverage for negotiations and could call a strike after the May contract deadline, marking the first Hollywood writers strike since 2007.
Though the television industry took a bit of a hit in 2022, it still has grown massively in the past two decades, thanks in part to streaming. In 2000, Disney, Fox, Paramount, NBC, Universal, and Time Warner had combined entertainment operating profits of $5 billion, according to WGA. In 2021, and with the addition of Netflix, that number grew to $28 billion.
But writers have been seeing their pay shrink, with more television workers earning MBA (minimum basic agreement) pay than ever before: In 2013-14, 86% of writers earned their contract’s minimum; by 2021-22, it was 98%. (That minimum compensation can depend on a number of factors—everything from program length and budget to a writer’s title and what they specifically did for the story. And as jobs become harder to come by, that rate has to stretch for months, sometimes even years, between gigs.)
The change is even more stark for higher-job titles, which also require more experience: While just 10% of coproducers and 2% of producers (which are also WGA jobs) worked at minimum in 2013-14, those numbers jumped to 59% and 31%, respectively. The median weekly pay for writers and producers has declined 23%, adjusting for inflation, in the past decade. “[O]ur minimum wage has become our ceiling,” Abbott Elementary writer Brittani Nichols explained on Twitter.
There are a few big issues the union is taking up in this negotiation. For starters, comedy-variety writers who work for streaming services aren’t even covered by MBA minimums, and the union is specifically asking for that addition.
The union also wants to address the “abuses of mini-rooms.” In recent years, writing rooms have shrunk in size, meaning less available jobs. These rooms once had 10, 12, or even 20 people, now “mini-rooms” are the norm, with the show creator and just “two or three other people,” Blagg says—and those workers often aren’t guaranteed pay through production.
Another big issue centers around residual pay; writers have seen shrinking residual checks in the streaming era. Traditionally, hit shows were sold to other networks to re-air, and those writers would earn residual checks, with a certain amount guaranteed to them when their show reran. “Now if you write on a hit for a network, they don’t sell it to another network, they sell it to their own streamer,” Ashley Nicole Black, who has written for A Black Lady Sketch Show, Ted Lasso, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, explained about residuals on Twitter. But residual payments are structured differently for streaming platforms, with drastically smaller payouts than when a show would rerun on a TV channel, and also diminishing pay—every year a show is on a streamer, the residuals decrease. “Residuals kind of don’t exist anymore,” Black added.
Streaming has also meant fewer seasons as companies try out and then quickly cancel shows. While you could once get on a show and ride out seven seasons, now many shows are only picked up for one or two seasons. That’s coupled with the fact that those seasons may have fewer episodes, which means fewer weeks of a job.
“A phrase I see that keeps going around with writers on Twitter, and in member meetings with the Guild, is that this particular negotiation feels like it’s existential,” Blagg says. “And that our entire career, our way of life, the traditional ways in which writers have been able to create a livelihood for themselves, feels like it’s crumbling—and it feels like it’s escalating quickly.”
Blagg noted that writers don’t necessarily want to strike; that can, of course, add more stress—financially and emotionally—to their lives. “We will strike if necessary, but honestly as much of the onus is on the studios to make a deal,” he says. WGA says its proposals for increased minimum compensation, better residual terms, and other contract asks would cost only about 2% of the operating profits for major studios. “The studios, despite what they’re saying about the various challenges and uncertainties of streaming, are making money, and they’re investing money to make more money in the future, “Blagg says, “but not bringing us along or sharing those profits.”
Blagg and Black aren’t alone in voicing support for a strike authorization vote. “These are the writers for whom we are voting YES—those who are looking at the ever-diminishing opportunity to chart a plausible and viable career in film or television. Studios must address how our industry has departed from that basic fairness,” tweeted David Simon, who wrote The Wire.
Tweeted writer Alanna Bennett, who has worked on Roswell, New Mexico: “Over the past 3 years I’ve been in 3 writers rooms, optioned 2 pilots, sold a studio feature on a pitch & wrote & rewrote & polished it, and more. None of that stopped me from having to go on EBT for a while. The current system is unsustainable.”
Actors, too, are sharing their support: Melanie Lynskey, who most recently stared in Yellowjackets and The Last of Us, tweeted that she stands with WGA members voting to strike, adding, “The main thing any of us have to go on when choosing a project is the quality of the script. It’s everything. There is no industry without writers. They deserve to be able to make a living!”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the strike authorization voting closed.
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