The writers won. I know that sounds jarring. It’s more common to hear something like, “the writers are arguing among themselves over some unimaginably trivial point of grammar”. But right now, the writers won. The 148-day-long Writers Guild of America strike is over. Now, the hard part begins.
The new WGA contract, which will almost certainly be formally ratified by members this month, was won at fantastic expense by thousands of screenwriters who went five months without work in order to hold the line. (I am a Writers Guild member myself, but we journalists were not on strike.) In July, when the strike was 10 weeks old, an anonymous studio executive infamously told the industry publication Deadline: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” And indeed, that came to pass.
What the executives did not reckon on was that the union would only grow more and more determined over those grinding months, while the resolve of the executives themselves would wither away under a ceaseless bombardment of public disdain. Writers, it turns out, are very good at making fun of rich villains. If the CEOs had been slightly less oblivious, they would have known that in advance.
The contract itself is, above all, a wonderful validation of the value of strikes. According to the WGA, the studios ended up nearly tripling the value of their initial offers, from $86m a year when the strike began in May to $233m a year in the final deal. In an industry that sprawls so widely – from movies to episodic television to late night comedy talk shows, and all the spaces in between – the contract was able to raise standards for everyone.
Some of its central provisions, like minimum staffing requirements for writers rooms, will serve to put brakes on the relentless erosion of the number of writing jobs available – the sort of deadly, profit-driven gigification of once-stable careers that afflicts taxi drivers, college professors, and screenwriters alike.
In the long sweep of history, though, what may be most remembered is that the WGA has won the first major union contract that creates a real, enforceable standard governing the use of AI. The contract guarantees that AI is not considered a “writer”, that companies cannot force writers to use AI, and that companies must disclose if writers are given any AI-generated material to work with.
These provisions are not a magic bullet. Studios will still be able to train AI programs with material screenwriters have written, which hints at the possibility of a future showdown over algorithms built to replace human writers. (Breaking Bad writer Vince Gilligan dubbed AI a “plagiarism machine”, which captures the essence of these programs more accurately than any explanation I have ever read.) Still, the substantive rules that this contract contains to keep AI somewhat in check are a Big Fucking Deal – not least because the tepid speed of governmental agencies means that union contracts will be the front line of AI regulation, period.
The WGA has laid the first brick in a wall that every other union in America must rush to help build in their own upcoming contracts. The 65,000 actors of Sag-Aftra who are still on strike today will lay the next brick in their own contract, which is sure to contain language protecting all of those people from being scanned and replicated by AI, then tossed aside forever. All of us had better hope that that wall is sturdy enough to keep the job-eating algorithms boxed in. There is, I’m sorry to tell you, nothing else standing between American society and a thousand capitalists who would love nothing more than to replace all of us with a smiling AI hologram happy to work for $0 an hour.
It is easy to get bogged down in the minute details of contract language and industry-specific provisions. But none of that is necessary in order to grasp the big picture. Hollywood is one of the few heavily unionized industries in this country. Because of that, all of the people who work there have a power of their own, a power to match that of the rich and glitzy studios that employ them. The workers can force the companies to negotiate. Therefore, the workers have won things. They have won more money. They have won better benefits. And they have won rules that shelter them from the full, annihilating force of unchecked capitalism.
For the 90% of Americans without a union, there is no such ability to negotiate. There are no such wins. And there are no such protections. Everything that makes us think of “Hollywood screenwriter” as a good job is due to the strength of the union. This contract is just the latest demonstration of that basic fact. If you do not have a union of your own, take this as a reminder to get one, fast.
On 22 September, the final day of the WGA’s strike, I went to the picket line in Manhattan. The union was picketing The View, which had continued to film in defiance of the strike. As hundreds of us marched in a ragged, block-long circle, a family from Florida that had planned to go sit in the show’s audience saw the picket line, stopped, and joined us instead of going in. They were not in our union. They were just regular people. But they saw the big picture.
“It’s nothing to give up,” one of them said. “We were supposed to see The View, but now we’re looking at a different perspective.”
It was enough to bring a tear to the most cynical writer’s eye. Every strike, and every union contract, does a little something to push the equilibrium between “humanity” and “coldblooded machine that loves only money” in the right direction. The writers won. They can get back to work for a while. Sooner or later, I promise, they will get to fight some more.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer on labor and politics, based in New York City
