I hope the writers make out like bandits.
The WGA Strike is on its 24th day today, and like most labor disputes, the conflict is simple: The writers want more. The studios also want more.
I’m not an economic expert on labor markets, and I’m not an expert on the film and television industries, and I’m certainly not an expert on the specific points of conflict in this negotiation. This is not an expert opinion, by any stretch. But the labor market in which the WGA is a player strikes me as one not dissimilar to my own—sports media—and I’ve noticed something in sports media which I think applies here as well.
If a job is desirable enough, rich kids get to do it.
This is not a complaint about nepotism, and it’s not a complaint about Ivy League legacy admits, and it’s not a lament of how big an advantage it gives some of us (myself included) to be raised in an environment which refines our ability to navigate systems like those navigated in a job hunt. Those things are all lamentable, but the core of the rich kid labor market is this: When enough people want to do a job, the pay for that job can be very, very low, especially at the entry level. When the pay for a job is very, very low, especially at the entry level, it helps the worker tremendously to not need money, especially in the short term.
By way of a few generations of generous ancestors who ran small businesses shrewdly and/or worked their asses off on the family farm, I came out of college with a respected degree, no debt, and money in the bank. I didn’t earn any of this, aside from maybe the degree (though even with that, I was mostly just meeting expectations the whole way through). Most of it was given to me. All of it allowed me, two years after college, to cut bait on a corporate cubicle career and launch into the art-parallel world of sports blogging, operating with enough inheritance wind in my sails that, with help here and there from odd jobs and a gainfully employed wife, I’ve been able to run this media entity for upwards of five years without yet turning a profit. Current projections have the effort becoming a full-time income in 2025, around the end of our eighth college basketball season if you count the All Things NIT days.
It is very rare to be able to do a thing with virtually no pay for five to eight years, whether that thing be music, acting, running a sports blog, digging ditches (if that’s where one’s passion lies), or—relevantly—writing for film and TV. I hope I appreciate this. People with jobs like mine often say they’re “lucky” to do what they do, but you don’t often hear about the mechanics of that luck. It gets passed off as something between a humblebrag—‘I’m lucky to have this talent’—and an implication that the career lottery in these industries has even odds for all who play. Everyone’s story is different, and most who’ve ‘made it’ worked admirably hard, and those who’ve made it from truly middle or working class means are remarkable achievers. But a lot of the stories have the same early thread. A lot of artists, journalists, and even athletes nowadays grew up rich. The odds in this lottery are not even.
In more self-contained industries, this is sad, but it’s more self-contained. Astronauts do important stuff, but it doesn’t change the world all that dramatically if astronauts come from nicer neighborhoods. With media—media broadly defined, from news media to music to everything the WGA touches—the problem is bigger. If a large portion of what our society consumes is produced by an abnormal slice of the populace, the product we consume—our cultural diet—is going to be out of touch with our culture. The quality will be worse, because the talent pool will be artificially shrunk by eliminating those more in need of high-paying jobs, but even beyond that, it’s just going to be an out-of-touch viewpoint. Why has political media struggled to find the pulse of voters so consistently this last decade, inflaming a sometimes-deadly culture war in the process? There are plenty of reasons, but one is that journalism, which is said to have once been a middle-class job, is now done primarily by people who can afford to, among other prerequisites, live in New York or Washington on an entry-level journalism salary. Many are doing their best, but it’s hard to connect with your desired audience when you have so little in common with that audience—when your friends’ parents were mostly married to one another, when your friends’ parents were mostly both around, when you grew up in a world where designer handbags were normal and everybody owned a car.
I’m not the most pro-union guy on the internet. Far from it, when it comes to unions in the public sector, and even in the private sector I find blanket pro-union stances to be too simple, willfully ignorant of the less savory effects so often accompanying unions, namely grift and public harm for the sake of special interests. But with the WGA Strike, holy hell, do I hope the writers get more money and more preferable working conditions. Not because I know what’s fair or unfair in a market I’ve never touched, but because I want better movies and TV shows, and I want movies and TV shows written by a population as representative of this country’s as it can reasonably be. Healthy, profitable studios make great art. But they need great writers to do it.
