The Impact of the Writers' Strike

With increasing impact of climate change, my focus has been on the environment where I've been fortunate to work with some amazing people, as evidenced by this latest article from a climate scientist discussing the need for empathy when reading data that will impact millions of lives. But I also work in the entertainment industry and have watched, with growing concern, the impact of the writers' strike on my own community.

Case in point: I was in a store the other day and happened upon two forty somethings who were discussing how long they would be out of work. Out of curiosity, I joined the conversation and found out that one was a chef, the other, an athletics trainer. Both cited the strike as the reason they'd been laid off.

There was also this demonstration by 'below the line' workers asking both sides to "strike a deal" for the same reason. These are the grips, florists, stunt coordinators, dry cleaners, caterers; the employees of the entertainment business. They are cutting their budgets to accommodate their new-found joblessness, which means: no restaurants, gyms, holiday gifts or other discretionary consumer spending while they hunker down and try to figure out a way to pay for their lodgings, their health care and their kids.

Hence the chef and the athletic trainer and the loss to all those that their consumer spending might have supported.

That is not to say there aren't good reasons for the WGA to strike or that the studios don't have their side of the story. Residuals for a creative intellectual property profession which, by its nature, includes long periods of layoffs, make sense. On the producers' side, there is legitimate concern about the rising cost of production, advertising, marketing, acquiring talent, compensating for piracy and, as another impact to the community as a whole, the lure of runaway production.

Speaking of runaway production, many studios are no longer exclusively run by those who see themselves as primarily a part of the entertainment community. Multinational corporations have a large piece of the pie and they tend to look at the world globally, a dotted line on a bottom line. What costs more? Where costs less? And what are all those people doing on the payroll?

The final count of how many people will be no longer be on the payroll and what the business looks like when this is all over is yet to be seen, not only by those who got their pink slips as the writers' strike was declared, but by those who are now getting their calls not to show up at the service industries that feed the studio sausage machine.

Does that mean either side should capitulate? I'm not saying that. But the only thing that is happening while negotiations are stalled is that people who are not on strike are losing jobs, while many of those who are on strike are not as rich as some would like us to believe, and, as such, could lose everything. Production companies, caught in the middle, face the dilemma of paying for employees out of their own pocket, letting them go, going on without writers or cutting separate deals with the WGA. The studios themselves face potential lost allegiance with the viewer access to expanding international cable (watched the BBC lately?) and the impact on the box office if the production quality lessens (rewrites do save movies at times). And then there are the up and coming writers who are not yet in the WGA, and who, as such, cannot, so far as I know, apply for the strike fund or claim financial core to work, which means they are, to put it bluntly, SOL.

As are, potentially, hundreds of thousands of others, as was reported in the Los Angeles Times:

Granted, some of the studios might not mind an extended work stoppage. Their pockets are deeper than the union's; they can endure more pain. And shelving talks with the writers lets the studios seek a precedent-setting deal with another union, the Directors Guild, whose contract talks begin next month.

But as we've said before, the strike's impact extends far beyond the writers and their employers. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are affected in Southern California alone. That's why we urge both sides to dial back the drama and negotiate again.

Negotiate again. I know a lot of people who'd vote for that.

Read more about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.

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