The Actors Guild have followed the Writers Guild and went on strike Thursday. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher was breathing fire when she announced the strike. She called out the studios who were giving CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but trying to claim poverty to the actors and the writers. She also pointed out that the new business models which utilize streaming services and the use of AI are leaving them by on the side of the road:
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher: "How they plead poverty that they are losing money left and right when they give $100 millions to their CEOs."
“If we don’t stand tall right now, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines” pic.twitter.com/zIIsNQjZHa— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) July 13, 2023
And who can blame her for being worked up, when they have to deal with cocky, arrogant assholes, like Disney Boss Bob Iger, who is already worth tens of millions of dollars and was just given a very lucrative extension on his contract. Yet, when it comes to the writers and actors, he's "I got mine, so fuck you!":
In March, the WGA released a report stating that more writers are working for the union’s negotiated minimum wage now than were a decade ago—including 49 percent of showrunners. On his Scriptnotes podcast, screenwriter John August noted that today’s writers assistants have less upward mobility in the industry than before, and that writers assistant wages haven’t budged since his time as a writer in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, Iger persisted.
“I understand any labor organization’s desire to work on the behalf of its members to get the most compensation and be compensated fairly based on the value that they deliver,” Iger told CNBC. “We managed, as an industry, to negotiate a very good deal with the Directors Guild that reflects the value that the directors contribute to this great business. We wanted to do the same thing with the writers, and we’d like to do the same thing with the actors. There’s a level of expectation that they have, that is just not realistic. And they are adding to a set of the challenges that this business is already facing that is, quite frankly, very disruptive.”
From what I've seen in reports and on various social media sites, the guilds have a strong resolve, which can be summarized in this tweet:
Every worker in Hollywood right now #SAGstrike pic.twitter.com/KCwSwEB0pT
— JustinTBrown (@JuuustinBrown) July 13, 2023
Solidarity!
And covered in a recent episode of Black Mirror on NetFlix.
