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A few days ago, WME (the last holdout) agreed to a franchise agreement with the WGA. This concluded the union's action regarding our agencies and their business practices. A thread on what this means:
From the beginning, our stance was simple and undeniable: you shouldn't own something (and thus want the cost of making it to be as low as possible) and also negotiate contracts for people to work on that thing.
That means you are not properly incentivized to maximize the contracts you're negotiating. Which, when you're an agent, is supposed to be *your only job.* That was the situation we faced -- an unexamined, 40 year-old problem.
The agents' response was, essentially: don't worry, we don't think that way. In many individual cases, they may have been right! But that wasn't the point. The point was that from an eagle-eye view, their business model contained absurd conflicts of interest.
They had tried this before, of course -- decades ago, legendary agent Lew Wasserman had mission-creeped over into production and ownership, and it took Bobby Kennedy and the power of the Justice Department to put a stop to it.
But they were trying it again, so we had to fight, again, and we won, again. Because when your job is to maximize something -- writer salaries -- you can't have another job, which is to minimize something -- production costs. It's fundamentally absurd.
So why did it take 3 years for them to capitulate? Partly because they were making so much money from producing and packaging, with the promise of so much more to come. Not giving up that lazy river of cash without a fight.
Partly because they've sold off parts of their companies to Venture Capital monsters at huge valuations, which were huge *because of the very business practices we were trying to get rid of.* VC bros are not generally interested in listening to unions.
Partly for the worst of all possible reasons to do anything: "This is the way we've always done it!" And partly because at least one shop (WME) wants to *go public,* a move which would create conflicts of interest the likes of which we'll be untangling for decades.
So it took three years, all told. But what it showed, here in 2021, much to my delight, is that unions work. Unions are the only hope for people to stem the tide of rampant, rapacious capitalism, which has been granted every possible break it has asked for, in my lifetime.
When athletes go on strike, people yell at the *players* for being greedy. "You're paid millions to play a game!" people say, somehow forgetting about the owners who are paid *billions* and don't even have to play the game, or risk injury.
When teachers go on strike, people yell at them for putting their own needs in front of kids'. When gig workers or Amazon employees try to unionize, they are terrorized, lectured, generally fucked with.
Three or four tech companies spent *hundreds of millions of dollars* to pass that garbage Prop 22 in CA this year, and voters stupidly passed it, because they (the voters) were told Uber and Lyft and DoorDash would "go away" if it failed. (They wouldn't have. That was a lie.)
Labor is *always* under attack in this country, because this country has an absurd deference to companies. Companies are good! Companies are productive. Companies are *people* when it comes to political speech. Companies!!!!
This was not a union action against companies in the traditional sense -- we were not striking those who pay us. But we were asking those who *represent us* in our endless battles with those companies to side with us, fully, instead of having one hand in each cookie jar.
That is not too much to ask. So we asked for it. And after 3 years, we got it.
Unions are just ways for people who do some kind of work to stick together and fight the people who represent them, or pay them, or control them. They are vital and meaningful instruments in the endless war between labor and people who want to grind labor into dust.
What the WGA just proved is that if people can stick together -- argue, sure, and disagree, sure, but stick together -- they can defeat forces much more powerful than they are. If that ceases to be true, in America, every one of us who doesn't work for a VC firm is in trouble.
Extremely proud of my union. Grateful to the show captains and leadership and everyone else who learned all the boring shit we had to learn in order to understand what the hell was going on, and why it needed to change.
Grateful to the dissenters, because with regard to internal discussion, no union is or should ever be a monolith. We hash it out behind closed doors, and present a unified front in public. That's how we wield power.
And endlessly grateful for the writers who make up the WGA. Thanks for hanging in there, writers. I know it wasn't easy for many of you. But we will all be stronger in the long run. And so will our union. /end
