The Writers Guild of America (WGA) have embarked on strike after failing to reach an agreement for higher pay from studios such as Walt Disney Co and Netflix Inc.The Guild represents roughly 11,500 writers in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Thousands of film and television writers went on strike on Tuesday, throwing Hollywood into confusion as the entertainment business struggle with changes caused by the current global streaming TV boom.
The last WGA strike, in 2007 and 2008, cost the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion as productions shut down and out-of-work writers, actors and producers cut back spending.
Media companies are facing critical time and harsh economic, they are under pressure from Wall Street to make their streaming services profitable after investing billions of dollars on programming to attract subscribers.
WGA in a statement released on its website said, “The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing.”
The group demands that companies should staff a with a certain number of writers for a specified period of time, whether needed or not in a show, given the existential crisis writers are facing.They said the companies have taken so much from the writers, who have made them wealthy.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the studios, said it had offered “generous increases in compensation” to writers but they refused the
offers.
Artificial intelligence was sighted as a another issue in the conflict, as WGA wants safeguards to prevent studios from using AI to generate new scripts from writers’ previous work. Writers also want to ensure they are not asked to rewrite draft scripts created by AI.
