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I am so happy for all the writers who can go back to agents they love working with at CAA, but I wanna talk about what this win says about our future...
CAA is not the only one signed to this side letter. It also binds TPG, their private equity, majority owners.
And what they agreed to is not just limitations on their business as it relates to CAA. They’ve agreed to limitations on future investments in studios, unrelated to their agency holdings.
A union action resulted in concessions from private equity, outside the scope of the current investment. This is a huge fucking deal. It may be unprecedented. We owned our power, we wielded it with courage, and we won. I am so proud of us...
A long while ago, our bosses pumped some poison into the town’s ground water that’s been served back to us ever since by people who are supposed to be our allies: the belief that in Hollywood, labor actions always lose more than they gain —
all this solidarity talk is embarrassing, we get paid well to do what we love for a living and if we’d just rely on good data and long standing relationships, we could negotiate fair pay and working conditions without all this disruption. Who do we think we are, coal miners?
But as the Disney investor presentation made crystal fucking clear, we might as well be miners to them. Chipping content out of IP mines.
They need a mountain range’s worth to keep the streaming train running and will do everything in their power to ensure that this new mode of transportation means they can pay us less.
Consolidation is scary. These giant telecom corporations gobbling up studios make it feel like our bosses are un-moveable behemoths. Like the battle for fair compensation in a streaming landscape is already lost…
But Disney, Warners and the rest of them have no future without the people who show up every day to create something out of nothing. Without artists and craftspeople, they have no growth, no future, no long term value.
And sometimes, in order to remind CEOs of that fact (or in the case of the agency campaign, teach them that fact for the first time) the people who create the value have to walk the fuck away.
Writer solidarity ended a corrupt practice that everyone in town treated as an immutable truth. We regulated a private equity firm’s involvement in our business. We remade our economic landscape.
If that’s what writers can do alone, imagine what we could do arm in arm with actors, directors, and crew?
I don’t know if I’ll be in WGAw leadership in two and half years, when it’s time for the next negotiation, but I do know this — everything is changing, and the bosses will never pay us what we’re worth unless we own our power, and wield it with courage.
Disney, Warners and the rest of them should be fucking terrified of us.
