![]() With writing jobs ending more quickly, even established writers must look for new ones more frequently, throwing them into competition with their less-experienced colleagues. While the recent television boom has created more jobs - there are about one-third more Writers Guild members today than a decade ago, and between one and a half and two times as many scripted shows - the guild says those jobs have been degraded, even as spending on content has escalated. The combination of these changes has upended the writing profession. (Actors receive residuals, too, and say their pay has suffered in other ways: The streaming era creates longer gaps between seasons, during which regular characters aren’t paid but often can’t commit to other projects.) The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in its statement that the writers’ most recent contract had increased residual payments substantially. Writers also receive residual payments - a type of royalty - when an episode they write is reused, as when it is licensed into syndication, but say opportunities for residuals have narrowed because streamers typically don’t license or sell their shows. “You can write a voice in your head, but if you don’t hear it,” said Erica Weiss, a co-showrunner of the CBS series “The Red Line,” “you don’t actually know if it works.” ![]() Not least: It improved the quality of the show. The “all around” approach had multiple benefits, writers say. ![]() Many of those who wrote scripts were also on set, and they often helped edit and polish the show into its final form. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and over.įor decades, making television shows was similar in some ways to the early days of automaking: A team of writers would be involved in all parts of the production. At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems - ignition, axles, transmission.īy 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast assembly line. The strategy of breaking up complex jobs into simpler, lower-paid tasks has roots in meatpacking and manufacturing. The writers’ experience shows how destabilizing that change can be. Resnikoff, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, “you get this tiered work force of prestige workers and lesser workers” - fewer officers, more grunts. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. ![]() While many acting jobs had long been shorter than those of writers, the union’s executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said studios’ “extreme level of efficiency management” had led shows to break roles into smaller chunks and compress character story lines.īut Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike last week, said its members had also felt the effects of the streaming era. While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. ![]()
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