Every large corporation is watching closely as they witness the 65,000 actors in the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and the 11,000 television and film writers from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) reach their fifth month on strike.
On May 14, 2023, the WGA released a report called, “Writers Are Not Keeping Up.”. The contents of this report detail how writing has been heavily impacted by TV streaming and burning issues on account of the increased use of AI (artificial intelligence). The report also mentions how the pay for screenwriters has stagnated over the past four years. Oftentimes their pay gets stretched over many months. This is especially difficult for screenwriters who are being paid at the minimum basic agreement (MBA). The average pay for writers who are a part of the WGA has declined by 4% over the past decade. Adjusting for inflation, the decline is 23%.
Accompanying those issues, even more are described in the same document. It highlights the fact that streaming shows of the comedy-variety are being denied basic MBA protections. These protections include the minimums for weeklies and scripts.
In response to the problems that the WGA has been working around, they are demanding a few things. These include the strengthening of professional standards and quality, the increase of the minimum compensation across all of the different types of media, increased TV writing pay, increased healthcare coverage and plans, and protection for the writers, amongst other things.
In all, many companies have leveraged their way around the MBA to underpay writers which has created lower-paid models for writer’s work.
