this is a pretty good article covering the contract and noting that it’s only an agreement with WGA (not SAG-AFTA) but i want to correct one point they make:
No. TV and film production doesn’t happen overnight, and while it will likely ramp up rapidly once the actors come back to work, the lengthy strike has caused inevitable delays and hiccups.
the delays have been caused by greedy execs who were literally hoping to starve their writers out instead of granting them contractual protections and paying them fairly
the execs have caused these delays and ultimately cost their corporations far more than what they’d have lost just agreeing to this contract in the first place
don’t forget that point. everything sucks because of shitty execs. nothing but greed and reluctance to acknowledge worker power was stopping them from coming to the table four months ago
In case you’re also interested in what’s actually been agreed on…
The exact language of the contract is yet to be released. But from the WGA summary, it appears the union was successful in its effort. The MOA includes increases to minimum wage and compensation, increased pension and health fund rates, improvements to terms for length of employment and size of writing teams (which had been shrinking drastically in recent years), and better residuals (which are like royalties), including foreign streaming residuals.
The MOA also lays out terms for artificial intelligence, with an agreement that doesn’t prevent writers or productions from making use of generative AI but prohibits using software to reduce or eliminate writers and their pay. “A writer can choose to use AI when performing writing services, if the company consents and provided that the writer follows applicable company policies, but the company can’t require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services,” the MOA states.
Additionally, “the WGA reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law” — a major issue given many authors’ recent discovery that their work is being used to train AI owned by Meta and other companies.
Those are some great accomplishments!
Are there any points on which they had to concede or compromise?From the wording it sounds like they only got foreign residuals on streaming, not US. Given that one of the biggest points of the strike was that writers weren’t getting payed residuals for streaming (which is increasingly the main market) it does seems like a fairly big concession.
Admittedly the biggest issue was that streaming services are shockingly opaque about viewership numbers. There doesn’t really seem to be an industry standard for what counts as a “view”. Does someone scrolling past a video and it auto playing 2 seconds count as a view, does someone watching 90% through than going to the next episode count as a view?
To agree to paying residuals on shows would require admitting to what people are actually watching on their services. They really seem to not want to do that. Probably because most of what they’re hyping up or promoting is failing in real terms and they want to keep massaging the numbers.
So the compromise is they’ll do it for exports but not domestic. Maybe because they can waffle on the reasons for failure in the foreign markets but it is harder to do that domestically.
They are getting residuals from the US, but the problem now is defining “subscriber”.
The residuals come if “20% of the subscriber base watches something within the first three months of its release”.
As the article I linked gets into, this is more complicated because certain streamers not only keep their subscriber base private (which they can still do, but they’ll have to give writers info, probably under NDA), but several also offer their streaming services as bundles with unrelated things (Prime Video with regular Prime subscription, Apple TV+ with Apple One, etc.).
So someone could be “subscribed” to Amazon Prime Video, but because it’s bundled in with the normal “online shopping” Amazon Prime, they have inflated numbers of Prime Video subscribers because not everyone with Prime cares about the streaming part of it all.
Figuring that shit out is going to be the main issue with regard to streamers.
