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Nobody is making anyone go into scriptwriting. No one is born in a Netflix company town where their dad takes them into the script mines at age 12. Fuck writers who want to get paid more than once for the same job. They should only get residuals AFTER all the people who do REAL WORK, like construction, grips, costume, makeup & animators etc. Most of them are much better at their jobs than writers especially for streaming services, and they are what screenwriters can lean on & novelists can't.
People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country's industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.
First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don't come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don't, like it's your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - "all who labor by hand or brain" is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.
Second, writers aren't asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it's writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it's usually an ok check, depending on the union's day rates and so forth, but you can't make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you're between jobs.
The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long "tail" - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn't work with streaming's new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.
So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show's revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.
Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn't for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we're graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.
I'm both public sector and white collar, and I'm a member of an NEA union. I'm an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it's my job to get working adults with jobs and families who've never gone to college or who've been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor's or a master's. If you don't think that's real work, you're free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.
...FYI.
One other data point to add: at any given point in time, 95% of the WGA is unemployed.* So what money you do manage to make needs to be enough to last you a while. (A five-figure script minimum may look like a lot, viewed from the outside... until state and Federal taxes have had their bite of it, and you realize that whatever's left may be the only writing money that person makes for a year. Or two. Or five.) This is where residuals become vital.
*I refuse to use the anodyne old theatrical-arts euphemism for not being engaged in paid work, "resting". If you're about to be broke (again!), trust me, rest is the last thing on your mind.
Real effective union if they can’t keep ninety five percent of their members gainfully employed.
That’s one reason why we’re on strike. Because we want to keep more writers in work longer.
But missing from your snark is the understanding that different kinds of jobs exist. Some jobs exist to allow the workers to work every day, or every weekday. Some jobs the workers work intensively for days or weeks or months and then may not work for a long time.
That’s where the concept of residuals comes from.
Actors on film or TV will only work for short periods, most of them. But you will enjoy their work for decades. Their unions have worked hard to make sure they got paid when films or shows they were in get repeated. That’s a feature, not a bug. There are only so many shows being shot, only so many movies being made.
The problem with a streaming world is actors and writers aren't being properly paid when things are available streaming all the time, because in the beginning these services were starting out and the producers asked us to cut them some slack as they weren't even profitable yet.
I’ve got friends who are members. I don’t broadly disagree with the stated goals of the union. I agree that residuals as they are are pathetic and they should definitely take streaming into account (if for no other reason than that those industries would be forced to publicize streaming statistics).
My point, such as it was, was more that they don’t seem very good at achieving those goals.
But they do.
Here. Perhaps this will help:
it’s also a good thing for white collar creative and academic workers to strike because they have the training and education to make their demands clear and accessible to the public, and to create and promote materials to people who haven’t had their educational opportunities. there’s plenty of dignity and smarts in blue collar labor, but not a lot of time to take a class on writing. or business. or financial literacy. but they can read a pamphlet, a newsletter, a well-composed twitter thread. the kind that educated writers are good at producing.
im so sick of the anti-intellectualism involved in assuming everyone with a college degree is some ivory tower snob who will pull the ladder up after themselves as soon as they get the barest crumb of power or respect. it’s pathetic, short-sighted, defiant snobbery, and it actively works against everyone’s interests.
creative work is work. academic work is work. all power to the people.
What roach said and ask yourself: where do these ideas about academics, and, writers, and other "white collar workers" whose jobs AREN'T bossing other ppl around and talking on the phone all day, come from? Are they maybe coming from Republicans and Republican organs like Fox News? Are they maybe coming from the same damn elites who ALWAYS attack labor actions as pointless, or likely to fail, or "spoiled"? Why are you letting people who performatively hate labor tell you what to think about a labor dispute?
"Republicans never, ever mention MLK unless it’s to call black people hypocrites. They never mention that his Letter From Birmingham Jail provides the philosophical underpinnings of Affirmative Action, they never mention that he was instrumental in creating both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and they sure as hell never mention that he was in Memphis that final day to support a local labor union."
when Trump said he’d create jobs, i didn’t realize the plan was to escalate rhetoric and advocate violence against the media in order to create work for bomb squads, but hey, it’s working.
as of this writing, i think we’re up to eight confirmed bombs sent to people that are Democrats, or media that are insufficiently friendly to Trump, so far today (or possibly some were yesterday?).
just for reference: this is not normal.
suggest that, if you don’t think it should be normal, you consider the possibility that the rhetorical environment in which it seems normal is probably the problem, and that the thing where the Republican party as a whole cannot be seen to say anything negative about Trump openly claiming to be a nationalist and praising people for killing dissidents and censoring their media is probably the primary root of that problem right now.
options include (1) cause the Republican party to stop doing that, (2) cause them not to be in a position of power.
suggestion: vote.
While not meaning to normalize it, but didn’t the white house and some republicans just receive ricin letters last month? I find it a bit strange that that kind of just slid under the radar without this discussion of either side normalizing this behaviour before or whatever, but then presumably a mirror version happens and this discussion is now at the forefront. I mean, are we just going to apply anything negative we want about whatever group we want to blame and say that it normalizes ricin letters now? How about any religion? I just don’t see the correlation here being justified and just trying to equate one bad thing as being the fault of a thing you want to be thought of as bad by others.
Uh… This line of discourse is sort of complete bullshit.
What normalizes violence is actively advocating for it and cheering it on and treating it as normal.
And since before the 2016 election, we’ve had people talking about getting death threats from Trump supporters, and Trump talking about how he could just shoot someone and his supporters wouldn’t care (true enough), and violence at Trump rallies, and Trump praising the fucking dictator of North Korea, specifically his “relationship with his people”, and Trump supporting the Saudis and accepting their claim that probably the journalist was dismembered before he even got to their consulate.
That is normalizing violence as a response to political disagreement.
It has nothing to do with “religion”. It has nothing to do with any of the other negative things you might believe about Trump’s coterie. There are people out there who are racist assholes and think that putting little kids in detention camps is great, who still absolutely oppose the normalization of violence. And they are not at fault in the thing where it seems normal that we’ve had more attempted political assassinations in the US this year than we had during probably any previous decade of my life.
I don’t see how you can look at someone specifically praising violence and repression, and calling out “the media” as the Enemy of the American People, and then say “I don’t see how that’s correlated to package bombs being sent to the media”.
It wasn’t ricin, it was ground up castor beans which, while they do contain ricin in small non-lethal amounts, are also the source of Castor Oil. Lethal doses of ricin can be refined from castor beans, but the process is somewhat more involved than just grinding them up. Here’s Wikipedia on castor bean toxicity. Here’s CBC’s Story on the whole episode(purely because it was the first reliable source google coughed up). If you’ve encountered stories claiming it was ricin either you were lied to by the sources of those stories, or it was very early coverage of the event.
the tl;dr on this story, as I see it, is: the guy has a history of domestic violence(<sarcasm>big surprise there</sarcasm>), is ex-Navy, and seems to have been distressed over his wife being sick and, presumably, the difficulties they’ve faced in getting her care, which he seems to blame Republicans for. Which, just to be clear: Isn’t Entirely Baseless. Republicans are trying to make medical care more Difficult And Expensive to obtain, and have been For Years. Pointing out such facts, as the stories I’ve linked do, is not inciting violence. Pointing out such facts even in a polemical tone, as some of those stories do, is not inciting violence.
And let’s be clear what this is being equated to here: Actual Pipebombs Mailed to Prominent Liberals and the Media. And the environment in which that is happening is one where the Republican president, as well as some other Republican politicians and pundits, frequently present Liberals and “The Media”(especially the individuals and orgs targeted by this attack) as the True Cause of Violence in US politics; portrays them as part of a Crazy, Dangerous, and Lawless Mob which threatens the US and its culture; Praise violence targeted at them and Patronize those who commit it; and justify all of this through constant and Ridiculous Lies. That is inciting violence. So: is “either side normalizing this behaviour”? Republicans certainly seem to be.
