The Strike
Posted by
Kevin
The Writers Guild is on strike. Some good info about the strike can be found here, and John Rogers explains the reason for the strike very well here. In essence, though, the studios don’t to give writers any share of the revenue from internet based distribution of television shows and movies. They want to keep all that money for themselves. That is frankly immoral and the best example of why we need unions. The studios would literally suck the writers of their creativity and not compensate them fairly for that creativity, despite the fact that the studios are selling, essentially, that creativity combined with the creativity of others. If there was no WGA, they could have simply imposed these rules on the writers in much the same way that WalMart imposes its working conditions on its employees.
Such imposition are not fair negotiations, by the way. Employees need the jobs to pay for food, clothing, shelter and health care and do not have the capital reserves required to wait out the companies in a negotiation. Corporations will always seek to keep wages as low as possible. Always. There is no incentive outside of unions and government regulation that will prevent them from doing so as the entire structure of a corporation is to wring as much money from the present with minimal regard to society or externalities. Strikes like these help prevent the erosion of the middle class and keep the economy and the job market healthier for all of us. The strike is about fairness for writers, yes, but it is also about fairness for the rest of us.
