Not always, but certainly sometimes.
Would you agree that all demands made by unions are reasonable?
No matter how many writers you have the studio will try to extract absolute maximum output from them.
If you are actually concerned about working conditions you would be advocating for demands that specifically address those working conditions. Minimum numbers dictated by the union does not do that.
I don’t assume that any demand made in any contract negotiation about the terms of contractual obligations in an enterprise whose details I’m not personally knowledgeable about must necessarily be reasonable.
I support the striking writers’ and actors’ guilds on general principles because I’m in favor of workers having some genuine collective bargaining power in negotiating with employers, and because it seems clear that the overall balance of power has shifted too far in the direction of the studio executives.
But I think it would be stupid and hubristic of me to pretend to assert what the optimum set of demands would be for the union to make, when I’m not knowledgeable about the details of the specific workplace conditions involved.
See above for my opinion of claims about a union’s optimum set of demands asserted by people not knowledgeable about the details of the specific union workplace conditions involved.
so you have no opinion on any of the demands being made by the union?
The first half of a more balanced version of this summary would read something like:
Employers, by their nature, want as few workers employed as possible in order to maximize employer profits. How many are truly needed is secondary to that.
Again, it is surprising to me to see the deference and positive spin with which the position of the employers is being treated here, in comparison to the skeptical accusations of ulterior motives on the part of the unions.
I don’t blame anybody for adopting a skeptical attitude about the good faith of parties to contract negotiations, but why is this skepticism active in only one direction? The juxtaposition of distrustful scrutiny of union positions with naive credulity toward studio positions just seems bizarre.
As in, do I claim to know exactly what choices the union should be making about any of its demands in order to make said demands optimally just and reasonable? Nope, I don’t, and haven’t done so.
It’s a union’s right and duty to fight for what it considers to be just and beneficial conditions of employment for its members, and I support their right to exercise that power. That doesn’t mean that I have a well-informed understanding of any of the specific details of the conditions the unions and studios are arguing about, or a meaningful opinion about exactly what consensus they ought to reach concerning them. (And I very much doubt that most, or even any, of the other posters in this thread do either, unless they themselves happen to be active parties in the negotiations.)
did you miss the post where I explicitly stated, in response to the possibility of overwork…
and also, on the same subject
Hardly a glowing endorsement of management propriety is it?
It isn’t. See above. It is only rational to be distrustful of the motives of both sides.
Uh-huh. That’s why you say
instead of
?
Your skewed perception of what constitutes balance or evenhandedness in your claimed “distrust” of “the motives of both sides” is not inspiring confidence here. I think perhaps you just don’t even see the extent to which you’re naively accepting studio positions at face value while rejecting union positions as self-serving and unethically motivated.
I have no problem with your restated comment, it is just a slight rephrasing of what I said. You could even make it shorter still and say
“employees will employ as few people as they think they can get away with”
The skewed perception of what I’m saying is yours and yours alone and I can’t help you with that.
If you have a concern about even-handedness then why not push some of the more overtly pro-union people on here and see if you can get them to explicitly question the motives of the unions?
It is at odds because you said that the employer should get to decide how many workers it needs. You acknowledge that this means the employer will try to minimize the number of employees. Given those two conditions, the inevitable outcome is that employers will overwork their employees.
It’s not merely a possibility. It’s inherent in the incentive structure. Unless there is some force to fight back against the incentive to overwork employees, companies will do so. That’s a basic concept of labor you seemed to not get.
Specifying hours may work in some types of jobs, but it’s not a great option for creatives. Giving the same creative person more time to create is not equivalent to having two creatives who can work with each other. Plus you want the writer to write when they have inspiration, and not have to worry about clocking in hours.
The concepts are essentially the same. Both are about resisting the employers incentives to exploit and overwork their workers. And that is what labor is all about.
If you’d said something like “the number of employees is a matter of negotiation between the workers and the employer” I would not have disagreed. I would have just pointed out that any demands of a union are part of that negotiation.
No, it is not inevitable because that overwork simply does not always happen where other safeguards are in place. (rather than union-mandated minimum levels).
?! You think that “Employers, by their nature, want as few workers employed as possible in order to maximize employer profits. How many are truly needed is secondary to that” is just a slight rephrasing of “Employers want as many people as needed to do a job and no more”?
Do you really not see how the latter version, your original formulation, is far more deferential to and less skeptical of the employer’s position than the former version?
The way you put it is credulously assuming that the employer’s preferred workforce size is selected on the basis of what is “needed to do a job”. The way I put it, on the other hand, is distrustfully assuming that the employer’s preferred workforce size is selected on the basis of selfishly maximizing their own profits.
If you really can’t see the substantial difference in attitude conveyed by that rephrasing, I don’t think we have any common ground to continue this conversation.
What “more overtly pro-union people” in this discussion are resisting “question[ing] the motives of the unions”?
AFAICT, everybody here is quite openly acknowledging, as LHoD noted in post #315, that the unions are exercising their power for their own advantage.
You’re the one who seems to be having difficulty acknowledging that the studios are also exercising their power for their own advantage. Instead, you keep trying to spin certain disputed contractual issues as though the studio is automatically and naturally entitled to “be the one to say” how to decide them, rather than both sides exercising their power by negotiating a resolution together.
Everybody else here seems to be perfectly willing to acknowledge that all the disputed issues are matters of labor contract negotiation, and that there are bound to be compromises on the parties’ demands if an agreement is to be reached.
how deferential is my final version?
“getting the job done” is the primary task and the primary driver of the workforce size. Otherwise no profit and no jobs for anyone.
I can attest from personal experience that your statement about “inevitable outcome” is false.
I assume you’re referring to the one poster you were responding to. What I’m actually seeing throughout this thread is mostly the uncritical view that everything that unions do is always just and right. The balanced reality looks more like the following.
Employers are concerned with producing a profitable product on time and on budget. The simple way to say this is that employers place a high value on efficiency.
Unions, by their very nature, are concerned only with worker benefits. These goals are often important and noble and may touch on everything from compensation to workplace safety. But they can also run directly counter to the employer’s quest for efficiency. The best outcomes are generally achieved when employer and union power are fairly well balanced. Unions with too much power have indeed been responsible for plant closures that may otherwise have remained open, with production moving to cheaper locations, sometimes overseas, with the consequent loss of all jobs involved.
In fairness to the WGA, the specific demand for a minimum number of writers stems in large part from the increasing and often abusive practice of studios around the use of a style of writers room called the mini-room, which often involves small numbers of lower-paid writers who are then released when production begins. More about it here:
The efficiency that capital seeks is this: to exchange the minimum of money for the maximum of labor in order to achieve the maximum profit. The less money they give per unit of labor (or, the more labor they get per unit of money), the more efficient they are.
The efficiency that labor seeks is this: to exchange the minimum of labor for the maximum of money in order to have the maximum lifestyle. The less labor they give per unit of money (or, the more money they get per unit of labor), the more efficient they are.
There’s a reason why labor unions and management are fundamentally at odds, and there’s a reason why, as long as a business isn’t worker-owned, the union is a necessary counterbalance to the owners.
That perception is definitely not just hers.
TL;DR: There is a power imbalance between employers and an individual employee. Unions are a force to equalize the power.
Maximizing profit is the primary task. Sometimes this is done with a small workforce (few overworked employees), but it can also be done with a large workforce (many part time, benefit-free employees).
Businesses will squeeze their customers, their suppliers, and their employees to maximize their own profit. See enshitification.
If the business is a monopoly, they will squeeze their customers. This is supposed to be balanced by anti-trust laws and competition.
If the business is a monopsony, they will squeeze their suppliers. This can be best limited by suppliers having a diverse market. Very powerful companies use this. Examples are Amazon and Walmart squeezing their suppliers.
Both of those circumstances happen when there is a power imbalance between the buyer and the seller. For example, Amazon and a small manufacturing company, or Comcast and residential internet customers.
There is almost always a power imbalance between a company and an individual employee. Sometimes it is big, like a labor monopsony, where there is a “company town” and all of the jobs are controlled by the coal mine. However the power imbalance of employer-employee does not require a large company. Even a person working at a small company may still not be able to freely leave their job without major consequences.
The point of unions is to level this power imbalance.
Bringing it back around. The union acts as a countering force to the company’s push to maximize profits. Sometimes that will be in changing the size of the workforce. Other times it will be in setting work place regulations, compensation limits, or benefits.
…I think your attempts to reframe the issues at play here into something you understand aren’t helping you. Because the writers are asking for a range of very specific things that are specific to the job of writing in the film and television industry. The “product” here is creating a blueprint that will be used by every department in a production to be able to do their job.
For example: how does the wardrobe department know what clothing to prepare? It starts with the script. What kind of set do the set designers need to build? It starts with the script. Props and the art department? Script. Actors? Script. Director? Script. Location scout? Script.
The “product” the writers are delivering is an entire world. The characters. The locations. The story.
And the end result is entirely subjective. Some of my favourite shows and favourite movies don’t get great reviews. The so-called “quality” is poor. Is the Big Bang Theory a good show? Is it good quality or bad quality? It doesn’t really matter. It made its network a heck-of-a-lot-of-money. And it had a fully staffed writer’s room, which is all the WGA are asking for here.
You talk about hiring programmers of “sufficient quality.” And how the “quality of programmers matter.” So lets ask ourselves the question: how do you get better quality writers? How do you get writers of “sufficient quality?”
You get them by giving them experience. Writers need to write. Writers need to have time on set. Writers need to spend time working as a writers assistant, need to spend time seeing how a writers room breaks a story, they need to see how a director or the wardrobe manager or the art director take their finished script, and use it to do their own breakdown.
Because staffing minimums isn’t about any one thing. It isn’t just about health and safety. It isn’t just about keeping the workload down. Its also about having enough people in the room to keep the creative juices flowing, to be able to bounce ideas around, to have arguments with, to debate whether or not a character should live or should they die.
And its also about the pipeline. In the last few years the streamers have taken to hiring inexperienced showrunners, understaffing the rooms, then cancelling the show after a single season, never hiring that showrunner again. In a system that works like this, how do you improve the “quality” of the writers?
Well you can’t. And what you end up with is the streaming environment that we have today, where much of the streaming landscape is populated with generic, souless content that is barely a blip on the radar any more.
If you want to think of it in software development terms, imagine a junior developer, a year into their first job as a junior coder at a multi-national corporation. Fresh out of school. Now imagine that this junior coder is given the job of over-seeing a new project that is basically the lead voice for the direction of the project, a project that has burn-rate of $2-10 million dollars per week, is in charge of between 2 and 500 hundred staff, and has unmissable deadlines.
Does that make any kind of sense to you at all?
You aren’t only in charge of other coders. You are in charge of the UX and UI teams. Marketing. Budgets. Everything depends on you. You’ve got to run the entire show, and you’ve got to write all of the underlying code as well.
And you aren’t given enough budget for a coding team. What they do instead is they hire a group of coders for a weekend, where you brainstorm and plan out what goes into that code. Then on Monday? Those coders get fired. Then you’ve got to write the rest of the code yourself. And you can’t be late. There can be no delays. Because that 3-500 people that work for you can’t do their jobs until they’ve got that code in hand.
Would you, as a fellow programmer working in another department, just stand by and shrug your shoulders? Because that workload would be difficult even for the most experienced of coding professionals. On a junior? It would destroy them. And not only would the code be riddled with errors, but everything else downstream would suffer as well.
The company won’t mind. Because this company spends billions on marketing anyway, so even if the quality of the end product isn’t great, the share price will go up, and thats the only thing that matters.
But you, as a programmer that works for that company, understands that you can only release a certain amount of products before your customer base turns their back on you.
The software company is only worried about extracting as much value from their “product” as they can, then cash out before it all collapses. It’s the essence of vulture capitalism.
And what I’ve described here with this fictional software company is pretty close to what is happening in Hollywood today. The studios are in the “extracting value” part of the game. They aren’t in it for the long-term. They don’t care about a sustainable industry.
This, along with health and safety and the general creative process, are why minimums are on the table.
I encourage you, as a starter, to read this John Rogers thread on training.
There are other explainer threads and article out there, but I’ve got this bookmarked, and Twitter search is borked and Google has been broken by AI SEO content, so its a bit difficult to compile them here. But WGA members have been very vocal about this, how important this is.
Without minimums, writers can’t get experience. They can’t learn the ropes. They don’t get time on set to learn all the nuances of the job. They don’t get to work with experienced showrunners so that they will be able to step up one day and run their own room.
With all due respect: how would you know this? I think the writers are in a much better position to know what is and isn’t important than any of us would be. And they’ve explained at length the reason why they are asking for minimums.
If it did, then the writers would be asking for this.
But this would be unworkable.
Because in television, everything hinges on the script. Its the blueprint. Deadlines can’t be missed. So any “maximum hours” needs a degree of flexibility, especially considering writers work for a few months at a time as opposed to what one would do if they were working a full time job.
Instead, the deliverables here are a single script. 6 episodes? 6 writers. And the amount of writers scales downward from there. 24 episodes? 12 writers.
How long does it take to write a script? It depends. But the WGA have got decades of experience here, and what they’ve but on the bargaining table is what has consistently worked in the past.
Minimum hours would require an entirely different calculation, and would only address one of the many different issues that minimum staffing tackles. It would do nothing about the training pipeline. It does nothing to help with the creative process. It completely misses the point.
This isn’t the gig economy. (Well, not yet, anyway.) Unfortunately, the mindset that you demonstrate here isn’t far away from the mindset of the people running the studios.
Bringing it back to programming: imagine you’ve been working on a complex codebase for months. It does some pretty funky, unusual things. And its Friday, 5PM, the code needs to be deployed first thing Monday morning, you meet the newly hired weekend-coder as you are walking out the door, hand over the codebase, wish them luck, then walk away.
Does that sound like a good idea to you?
This isn’t how any of this works. Writers aren’t some sort of magical thing that can be instantly subbed in and out like
the average shift worker. And even shift workers have a formal hand-over process that, as the job increases in complexity, becomes more detailed as required.
I’ve already gone over this in this thread a couple of times, but I’ll do it again.
Everything starts with the writers room, in a process called “breaking the story.”
Here is the showrunner of Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, explaining how breaking a story works.
Its a process. They build the world. They create the characters. They break the story. Card-by-card. Beat-by-beat. This is a collaborative process. the important part is this:
(Not an exact quote, taken from auto-generated captions and reformatted by me)
They typically break the show, then they allocate the episodes, then they break things down episode-by-episode, and then the writer goes off to write the episode.
The very idea of having “weekend writers” breaks this process. It doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t compatible in any workable way at all. It would require an entirely new process. And I don’t think anyone, either the studios or the writers, would want something like this. It doesn’t make any sense.
TLDR: what you suggest isn’t workable, and doesn’t address all of the reasons why the guild are asking for minium staffing levels.
…yep. Which is why the WGA are on strike.
I’ve been advocating for demands that specifically address these working conditions throughout this entire thread.
Yeah, they do. As well as a number of other things that I’ve outlined extensively in other posts.