It’s been a while since I last checked in on the possibility of a writers’ strike when the contract expires on May 1.
A year ago, when the world was young, I rated the chances of a strike pretty high, at something like 60%. My logic, looking at the fundamentals of the situation, was:
• On the WGA side, with blood running high leading into the agency action, the writers were on the march, calling for heads on pikes and turning the industry to a utopian, writers-led commune.
• On the studio side, I saw the streamers in the driver’s seat and seizing this moment to advance the truly cherished goal of the tech companies: Break up the unions, pay huge amounts to a small number of people at the very peak while turning everyone below into minimum-wage chattel.
A lot has changed in a year—and with it, the calculus on a strike has evolved.
Let’s start with the writers. No one could’ve imagined that nearly a year later, they would still be mired in the agency action, with no relief in sight from the courts. Whatever the merits of the Guild’s case, spending a year in pitched conflict with their own agents over an issue that is fast becoming irrelevant is not ideal.
Neither is it a great walk-up to a contract negotiation where to have any leverage, the rank and file has to be ready to drop their pens and head to the barricades.
Not only has this prolonged action left the Guild masses exhausted and confused (if still publicly united), but more important, from the standpoint of the negotiations, it has worn out the patience of many (and I hear many, many) of the Top 50 Brand-Name Showrunners for any more disruption of their lives instigated by their beloved guild.
The leverage they have is that if, say, 20 of them were to walk away, to decide to go Fi-Core or redefine themselves as producers, they’d essentially be giving the streamers what they want—the top talents—allowing them to cut a very different sort of deal with “everybody else.” That would be game over for the writers as bargaining power.
Even more to the point, if you’re planning to bring the industry to a halt and call your members to a work stoppage a few months from now, we’re at or past the time when they should be making clear what the issues are and what’s at stake here. Instead, they are mired down with the agencies, and there hasn’t been a peep about the contract.
The greater problem is that it’s not clear what the issues are that would necessitate a walkout. The streaming world does, in fact, represent an existential threat to writing as a sustainable class profession for the vast middle in a prohibitively expensive city. But it’s not clear what the solution is to that conundrum. At the very least, it’s not clear that the WGA has a solution to propose.
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