This month, Hollywood productions ground to a halt.
On May 1, the Writers Guild of America announced its unanimous decision to call a strike against their employers, a group of massive companies represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Eleven weeks later, on July 13, the picketing screenwriters in the WGA were joined by actors and artists unionized in the Screen Actors Guild — American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA.
The writers and performers are negotiating on a number of issues spurred by both modern advancements and classic profit maximization. Chief among the demands are increases to compensation (including residuals and health benefits), job security in the era of on-demand video streaming and guarantees from studios that modern software won’t take over the creative work of casts and crews.
Hollywood’s history of strikes is storied, with at least one organized labor stoppage occurring almost every decade since the 1930s. Before 2023, the WGA’s most recent strike spanned 14 weeks from November 2007 to February 2008. Meanwhile, actors last held a significant general strike 43 years ago, from July to October 1980.
A dual picket of writers and actors like this July’s is even more infrequent: the last was more than 63 years ago, when the respective unions’ independent protests overlapped for six weeks in 1960. At the time, SAG–AFTRA was led by then-actor Ronald Reagan, who would ironically go on to push a strong anti-union campaign 20 years later as U.S. president.
The timing of this “double feature” strike is no coincidence, however.
For one thing, walkouts and labor unions — successful or not — have made a reasonable resurgence over the past year among employees of several corporations, such as Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Amazon and institutions like the University of Michigan, among others. Though many of these unions share demands, such as wage hikes, direct comparisons are difficult to make, as every worker collective and its industry’s circumstances are unique. It also remains to be seen whether the recent growth in support of organized labor will be reflected in tangible gains for workers in the upcoming months and years.
Another unavoidable topic driving the popular discourse is artificial intelligence. Language-based machine learning software like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard has exploded in popularity among students, employees, entrepreneurs and internet creators. Not only is it fascinating to see what a machine can put together, it can be a relief to offload some of the creative work for a job or a class. However, many employees aren’t thrilled about the possibility of their role being digitally outsourced, and film and television workers are at the forefront of the debate.
AI seems to offer a great deal for studios who might decide soon that they don’t want to shell out for expensive human employees. Performers want to ensure their likenesses — their physical appearances, voices and unique performances — can’t simply be scanned and repurposed with AI tools by studios without due credit or compensation. Screenwriters also see the potential for advanced language models to expropriate work from writers’ rooms. Even so, the WGA appreciates some aspects of AI technology and has proposed a compromise that would keep the human artists on the credits list when software is involved.
Luckily for the two professions, AI isn’t yet capable of truly novel creativity. The chatbots and simulations of today may seem eerily organic and spontaneous, but that’s because they’re trained to be. They are programmed to scrape data — written, spoken or acted — and guess at what makes the source material sound coherent and unique. Currently, AI tools are good at that job up to a point, but, on their own, they’re much worse at tasks like generating novel plot structures, recognizing harmful tropes and solving math problems, to name a few examples. Nevertheless, the advancements of technology can never be forecasted accurately, and the Hollywood unions’ prudence in getting ahead of AI is likely a wise bet.
Finally, how the public consumes media is pivotal to the unions’ negotiations. The streaming boom has meant that incredible movies and TV are available for the most part wherever, whenever. However, it also has meant production companies shrinking the amount and lengths of TV seasons, production times and budgets for cast and crew. Writers now have weeks’ less time to complete shows with fewer co-writers and a shorter cushion to line up future productions. Residuals, the union-mandated royalties for the continued success of a show or film, are pitiful for actors and writers alike. In a TikTok video, actress Kimiko Glenn shared her monthly residual check from Netflix for her work on the flagship series “Orange Is the New Black” — a pitiful $27.30.
Many actors and actresses, whether they be on the silver screen or streaming services, are making these astounding realities known to the general public. As consumers of entertainment, we tend to assign faces to names, names to roles, roles to pieces of media, but we often forget about the individual behind these art forms. Those considered to be “household names,” like Susan Sarandon or Kevin Bacon, are highly decorated and respected artists, but they are still at the front of the picket line demanding better benefits and respect for themselves, their fellow actors and the writers that support them.
This level of commitment, both on the picket line and in the wings from “A-list” actors and actresses, emits a feeling of solidarity that should not go unnoticed. One may feel as though these entertainers have nothing to be “upset” about — that their paychecks are high and they are rarely without work — but that doesn’t mean they have nothing to gain from their vocal interference in negotiations.
A key tenet of organized labor is solidarity, the idea that the most successful in a field have a responsibility to support and stand with the average worker. And, as seen in the cases of Glenn and Emmy-nominated actress Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria”), the average worker doesn’t always earn enough to comfortably make ends meet, especially in an area with a high cost of living like southern California. The same holds true for many screenwriters who are still building portfolios, aren’t also directors or don’t run their own shows.
Regardless of net worth, there is immense value in owning your own work and directly reaping the benefits of it. The time and energy spent on creating a movie or writing a television show should not conclude with the fear of not knowing who may own it or get the royalties from its distribution — all actors and writers should be included in the process and feel confident in the future of their art.
From visual artists to musicians, artists have continuously struggled with maintaining control over the content they produce, with corporations, record labels or producers themselves taking both creative and financial control. The actors and writers on the picket line, whether they be the icons of Hollywood or the faces that make up the background of your favorite movie, deserve to take back the art they’ve toiled over and feel great pride in. Actors and writers should not be treated as “content making machines” that work at our beck and call — they are artists, individuals with a great level of human understanding and the tendency to change lives.
Movies and television don’t just give us an hour or two of entertainment — they make us into different people for a while, often permanently altering how we view life. The people that inhabit writing rooms and film sets deserve all of our respect in their fight to benefit from their work, both creatively and financially. This understanding of unions should translate to other aspects of our existences — from those U-M graduate students who value the pursuit of knowledge to the Starbucks workers fighting for better working conditions, we should recognize that those individuals on strike aren’t withholding their labor or value from us, but are fighting for their own values, morals and livelihoods.
The ongoing Hollywood strike, along with many others in recent years, has witnessed the development of so-called “virtual picket lines.” Defined as an “electronic boycott of institutions whose workers are on strike,” this type of picket line is largely a byproduct of an increasingly high-tech world. The emergence of this, however, has created much gray area for strikers and supporters alike surrounding what actions are permissible within the digital realm.
Accordingly, it’s crucial that we do our part as consumers of media to understand the unions and their demands. While the unions have not asked fans to boycott productions or streaming services, such as Netflix or Hulu, it remains critical to support film studios that prioritize fair contract negotiations and protections for actors and writers. Taking the time to educate oneself, conducting research on these studios and making an active effort to watch and promote responsibly-produced films is pivotal in the fight to guarantee fair labor practices.
Additionally, it is equally important to support the interests of groups such as student filmmakers and creators that are disproportionately impacted under these conditions. These student filmmakers lack the same level of protection afforded to union members, and as such are especially vulnerable in this situation. To uplift these emerging talents, consider seeking out student film groups and showings at local universities and film schools. Take a break from the major studios and check out some films made by University of Michigan students.
So, while you may not have to call off your plans to see the new “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” screening just yet, it is important to attend these events with a contextual awareness of the ongoing situation. The artists working for these production studios are more than just the sum of their creative products — they’re people. It is due time that Hollywood treats them as such.
