The Writer’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild of America are currently on strike. They are on strike because the highest paid actors are and, as best I can tell, all of the writers were getting entirely screwed by previous deal. A deal, I would note, they negotiated after realizing that they were getting screwed by the previous deal. Screenwriters do not appear to be a position to negotiate particularly good deals.
There’s no shame in that, by the way. This isn’t necessarily about shrewdness. The NFL players union has never been able to negotiate the deals on the level of major league baseball. Sometimes the structure of an industry and a labor market simply favor one side of the bargain. In the case of Hollywood, actors have always struggled with the reservation wages of non-guild members i.e. people will to act in movies for free in the hopes of hitting the jackpot and becoming a big star. I think the writers have a different problem.
The problem for writers is that the studios don’t know anything. They don’t know what they want, who’s good, who’s not. More importantly they don’t know what anybody or anything is worth. As best I can tell, the only thing they know is that paying less is better than paying more.
“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” ― William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade
This is a problem for writers because you can’t collectively bargain on behalf of thousands of writers against an idiot. The writers guild will tell you that they have no choice to bargain with said idiot because that idiot controls the studios and without the studios there is no business.
Ok, I get that. I’m not going to play the “Just make all your movies on an iPhone and distribute them on YouTube card…<whispers> even though a lot of you would be better off making your movies on an iPhone and distributing them independently. What I am saying that you don’t have to negotiate with studios. Plural. You can negotiate with a studio. Singular. Get it?
I’m telling you to break the cartel. DC is getting killed by Marvel. Negotiate a deal with DC. A24 is making the best movies in the world. They are small and they need their output in theaters selling tickets. Negotiate a deal with just them. Will it pay more than Marvel? Of course not. But it will employ 0.3% of your members for 6 weeks and set a precedent for small individual studio deals. Pretty soon that turns into 4.1%. Set the precedent that your guild is here to play hardball and will play the studios off against each other on behalf of your members. Each new deal is a valve that lowers the pressure on your members while simultanesouly ratcheting it up for the hold out studios that aren’t producing anything. If the larger studios attempt to punish those who negotiate deals with the guild, sue them for antitrust. Sue them for $200 billion. When it comes to “cartel-like” behavior, unions have vastly more legal latitude than industry players. It’s your job to take advantage of it.
And while you’re at it, negotiating all these bespoke deals, maybe add in a little flexibility. Maybe be a little more humble about your ability to prognosticate the future and don’t tie your selves to outragenously bad arrangements that leave writers of hit shows walking away with $3000 and a negative account balance. And if and when you realize your deal is this bad, strike sooner. Years sooner. The whole point of a union is gain bargaining power through collective action. If you can’t take action until something has passed the point of complete disaster, that doesn’t speak well of the union.
I am in the somewhat unusual position of generally liking private unions* that can survive on their own merits specifically because they represent another power player that balances the playing field, which leads to more competition, and more competition is better for everyone. But just because a union is a collective entity does not mean that they have to treat the opposition as a de facto collective entity. Play them off against each other. Break them down. Play dirty.
This isn’t show friends. Or even show cartels. This is show business. Bloody start acting like it.
*Public unions are a vastly different story and, full disclosure, I tend to be far more skeptical of them.
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