Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Anonymous:
Nobody is making anyone go into scriptwriting. No one is born in a Netflix company town where their dad takes them into the script mines at age 12. Fuck writers who want to get paid more than once for the same job. They should only get residuals AFTER all the people who do REAL WORK, like construction, grips, costume, makeup & animators etc. Most of them are much better at their jobs than writers especially for streaming services, and they are what screenwriters can lean on & novelists can't.
People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country’s industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.
First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don’t come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don’t, like it’s your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - “all who labor by hand or brain” is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.
Second, writers aren’t asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it’s writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it’s usually an ok check, depending on the union’s day rates and so forth, but you can’t make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you’re between jobs.
The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long “tail” - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn’t work with streaming’s new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.
So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show’s revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.
Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn’t for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we’re graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.
I’m both public sector and white collar, and I’m a member of an NEA union. I’m an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it’s my job to get working adults with jobs and families who’ve never gone to college or who’ve been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor’s or a master’s. If you don’t think that’s real work, you’re free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.
One other data point to add: at any given point in time, 95% of the WGA is unemployed.* So what money you do manage to make needs to be enough to last you a while. (A five-figure script minimum may look like a lot, viewed from the outside… until state and Federal taxes have had their bite of it, and you realize that whatever’s left may be the only writing money that person makes for a year. Or two. Or five.) This is where residuals become vital.
*I refuse to use the anodyne old theatrical-arts euphemism for not being engaged in paid work, “resting”. If you’re about to be broke (again!), trust me, rest is the last thing on your mind.
Real effective union if they can’t keep ninety five percent of their members gainfully employed.
That’s one reason why we’re on strike. Because we want to keep more writers in work longer.
But missing from your snark is the understanding that different kinds of jobs exist. Some jobs exist to allow the workers to work every day, or every weekday. Some jobs the workers work intensively for days or weeks or months and then may not work for a long time.
That’s where the concept of residuals comes from.
Actors on film or TV will only work for short periods, most of them. But you will enjoy their work for decades. Their unions have worked hard to make sure they got paid when films or shows they were in get repeated. That’s a feature, not a bug. There are only so many shows being shot, only so many movies being made.
The problem with a streaming world is actors and writers aren’t being properly paid when things are available streaming all the time, because in the beginning these services were starting out and the producers asked us to cut them some slack as they weren’t even profitable yet.
I’ve got friends who are members. I don’t broadly disagree with the stated goals of the union. I agree that residuals as they are are pathetic and they should definitely take streaming into account (if for no other reason than that those industries would be forced to publicize streaming statistics).
My point, such as it was, was more that they don’t seem very good at achieving those goals.
I don’t see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to “eliminate the risk of theft” (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women andgirls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.
The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.
The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.
This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation– every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about–every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.
111th anniversary
They were discouraged from breaks because they were actively trying to unionize, and bosses felt that keeping them from unsupervised contact would prevent them from joining the garment workers’ union.
This is why unions are important. This is why today, right now, the biggest companies in America are trying to squash unionization of their laborers and why those workers are fighting so hard to unionize.
@tikkunolamorgtfo did a great write-up a few years ago about the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and I highly recommend reading it (and anything else you can about the fire). It is painfully relevant still and it’s incredibly important women’s, Jewish, immigrants’, and workers’ history.
I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.
So like… ok. I haven’t researched this and I’m mostly thinking out loud, so forgive me.
I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.
A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he’s the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.
And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler… christ, how did I do all this?) I’m looking at the issue with fresh eyes.
I hear sometimes about the ‘slim down,’ where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales’ when they dont need to be.
Like I’m looking at the possibility of starting a business and I’m looking at the jobs I’ve had that burned me out and why. And it’s almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff’.
Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.
And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.
It’s not like that anymore, is it?
So when I hear someone bemoan that 'no one wants to work anymore’ I just think… y'know, work ain’t what it used to be. When you’re working the work of 3.5 people because someone at corporate decided it was right and good to hire less people than they need because it saves them 20$ per hour per store, but you still dint get your bonus because shrinks too high or they didnt make the amount of money they thought they would or you gave too many coupons ONCE. And it’s like they’re actively trying to chase people away, and then threaten you with automation but they do t make work attractive enough for people to show…
Work dont want no one anymore.
Oh damn, the notes on this. Apparently it’s not my imagination and y'all have lived some horror stories.
I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no’ to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.
I’m thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.
That’s no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it’ when they started making me work outside my title.
Because that took a serious toll on my mental health.
I HAVE A UNION JOB AND LET ME TELL YOU SOME THINGS
It is part time, contract, hourly, full remote. Because it’s union? They have to offer me a minimum of 25 hours a week. If I *voluntarily* go under, that is on me, but they ALWAYS offer me up to that. If I ask for the hours, they HAVE to give them.
Overtime doesn’t trigger until 40 hrs/wk… but any time spent on emails, spreadsheets, my timesheet, ANY admin task that’s more than 15 min? I can bill for that. ALL training, meetings, etc? I bill for that.
I get holiday pay. Seperate from vacation, sick leave, personal time; if it’s a federal or state holiday I *automatically* get 5 hours of pay for that day. Period. Unlimited. I got paid 5 hours to do nothing on MLK day and presidents day, no questions asked, nothing taken away from my other pay.
I get sick leave, vacation leave, “personal” leave (anything that isn’t the former two – like, “my friend had an accident and I need to drive them home”). I get health insurance, dental insurance, life insurance. I get access to the credit union. I get access to job search help if my position gets dissolved / I get laid off!
It costs about $80/month in union dues, but I MORE than get that back in terms of benefits and peace of mind, and it’s automatically deducted from my paycheck.
I am so fucking sick of CGI this, CGI that. give me back on location filming (when possible), give me back intricate hauntingly realistic animatronics and puppets, give me back handmade props & masks & skillful make up……..just give me back practical effects I am begging
You know how you get practical effects back?
You unionize CGFX.
Seriously, the well established disciplines of prop design, set design, costume design, etc, all have equally well established unions (Sometimes called guilds); and CGFX being a relatively young discipline hasn’t caught up, so you have these sweat shop CGFX studios churning out what a design team would get paid three-four times as much for (with a tenth the total amount of labour).
And so the only solution is to unionize the field of computer graphics so that the field as a whole charges the same rates and demands the same basic decency of working conditions demanded by the various practical effects guilds.
