<
https://doctorow.medium.com/hollywood-is-the-single-best-example-of-mature-labor-power-in-america-2f691e6bad08>
"The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is closed for business. The union’s
bargaining documents reveal a cartel of studios that refused to negotiate on a
single position. This could go on for a long-ass time:
<
https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/members/member_info/contract-2023/WGA_proposals.pdf>
The writers are up for it. A lot of people are saying this is the first
writers’ strike since 2007/8, but that’s not quite right. That was the last
time the writers went on strike against the
studios, but in 2019, the writers
struck against their own talent agents — within the space of a week, all 7,000
writers in Hollywood fired their agents. They struck against the agencies for
22
months.
<
https://deadline.com/2023/04/hollywood-strike-writers-guild-studios-talent-agencies-1235333516/>
The agencies had consolidated down to four major firms, two backed by private
equity who loaded them up with debt that could only be repaid if the agencies
figured out how to vastly increase their profits. They did so, by unilaterally
switching the way they did business with their clients. Instead of taking a 10%
commission on the creative wages they bargained for, the agencies started to
take “packaging fees” from the studios for putting together a writer, director,
stars, etc. These fees came out of the same budget that the talent got paid
from, so the higher the fee was, the less the talent made. Soon, some
showrunners were discovering that they were getting 10% and their agents were
getting 90%!"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
