WGA Strike Battles for Diversity in Hollywood

Jireh Deng

When Caroline Renard moved to Los Angeles 10 years ago, she had zero connections to Hollywood. But she was determined all the same to break into the industry and did all sorts of side gigs — from working at Veggie Grill to driving for DoorDash and Lyft to babysitting — all to pay the bills while she worked on her craft. 

And that hard work eventually paid off.

She moved up from production assistant on set to an executive assistant at Disney before becoming a writer’s and showrunner’s assistant until she became a staff writer on a show. But throughout that decade breaking into Hollywood, she oftentimes noticed she was one of the few or only Black women in the room. She credits mentors and great bosses for championing her work, but she frequently felt like it was a battle just to be heard as a creator of color. 

Today, Renard is a writer on Disney’s Secrets of Sulphur Springs and a union captain with the Writers Guild of America. But the golden era of streaming has officially burst — she was one of more than 11,500 writers and others who went on strike May 2 after their current contract expired and negotiations fell through with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (which represents the nine largest Hollywood studios).

Among the WGA’s demands: Restricting the use of artificial intelligence in writing, establishing transparency in viewership-based royalties, paying writers their weekly minimums during post-production of shows, and preserving a minimum staff of six writers with guaranteed employment for 10 consecutive weeks on prospective shows. These demands were all flat-out rejected by the major studios. And now production in Hollywood has essentially come to a screeching halt.

As negotiations deadlocked, the AMPTP released a statement, according to Deadline, that they had offered “generous increases in compensation for writers as well as increases in streaming residuals” and are open to further improve the current offer, but that they’ve been unable to concede to the WGA’s demands around “mandatory staffing” and “duration of employment.”

But writers like Renard aren’t willing to back down on the entirety of their demands at a moment that feels existential for her profession — and hope the WGA won’t back down either.

“If we don’t change what’s broken now, writing won’t be a viable career,” says Renard. “There won’t be a middle class in this industry because writing has become a gig economy. It is not sustainable.”

Renard is referring specifically to the proliferation of mini rooms, smaller versions of full-scale writers rooms that have grown in popularity as streaming services like Netflix have flooded their platforms with high quantities of shows.

Now, it’s more common to see shorter seasons (maybe 10 to 14-episodes) instead of the former broadcast seasons that would be longer and carry on for maybe 24 episodes in a season. These conditions, the WGA says, have sucked writers into the orbit of freelance work.

“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 WGA stated in a public announcement about the strike. 

This is a portion of a blog that originally appeared in full at In These Times on May 11, 2023.

About the Author: Jireh Deng (they/them) is a queer Asian American writer and filmmaker born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. 

The post WGA Strike Battles for Diversity in Hollywood first appeared on Today’s Workplace.

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