Writers vs. the man / on strike | JF William

15 YEARS AGO… What was gained from the 2007 strike that went on for a hundred days. What was accomplish? One of the things gained was domain over the internet. That’s when all of these streaming services were first popping up and YouTube was a thing. Studios were saying that writers should not have any payment for anything that goes online. And if we had not made those gains, if we had not gone on strike and put our foot down back then, there wouldn’t be television writers now. Can you imagine all of the streaming shows that you know and love with writers not making any money off of those? That was the future that the studios wanted. They want to continue to push us down and bully us. The studios have devalued our contributions. They have shifted the industry to prioritize streaming, while not following that up with the actions of making sure that our pay reflects those changes. A lot of the ways that writers are able to sustain a career are through residuals. That means that we’re taking part in that profit participation when a show gets reaired or a show gets sold or a movie gets aired. That’s when we get a little bit of that pie. And the amount of the pie that we’re getting in streaming is almost nonexistent. The streaming companies who are actually negotiating are Hulu, Peacock, HBO, Paramount, Disney, Apple TV, Netflix and Amazon are the big ones. Last year, 8 Hollywood CEOs made nearly $800 million, yet pay for TV writers has fallen by 23 percent over the last 10 years. I stand with the nearly 12,000 @WGAWest writers on strike for a fair contract.