Features
Writer’s Guild strike: Old labor meets new media
For those of you outside the United States, this past month's strike by the Writer's Guild of America may not have been high on your minds. For those of us Stateside, the strike meant broadcast re-runs and a slowdown of the TV and film business. While the strike has had a real-world impact on the livelihoods of individual writers and large media corporations, it has also served as a great illustrative example of the shifts in industry and labor over the past 100+ years.
In the 20th-century, labor unions stood for minimum wage standards, shorter work weeks, employee safety and worker benefits. This golden age of labor remains etched in our minds with a history largely painted in black-and-white newsreels. These films capture an era when most of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents worked with their hands -- mining coal and iron ore, reaping crop harvests, constructing homes and working industrial assembly lines producing the products feeding growing consumer economies worldwide. My dad has been constructing homes for 40 years. My grandfather built municipal parks, roads and water systems. My great-grandfather was a nursery gardener fresh to the United States from the Netherlands almost exactly 100 years ago. And the women in my family? All teachers and all union.
If you're like me, you sit at a desk, type away earnestly at your keyboard, talk on the phone, send emails and occasionally get out to see a client in person. Today most of us don't actually produce "things" -- we produce ideas. This is the crux and most interesting aspect of the WGA strike as its leadership attempts to quantify the future value of the creativity driving today's enormous entertainment industry both here and around the world. The union's argument is that a new, rapidly-evolving marketplace calls for a revisiting of the old models of how we value content and the labor in creating it.
This is the sweet spot that drives today’s licensing business. We and our customers are all rushing for the high ground in the new space of repurposed use of existing film content already invested with an enormous value of visual creativity. New ideas, new platforms and new uses of content are being translated into new revenue streams both today and in the years to come. The WGA strike is only the latest example of the friction in dated models rubbing against new business and worker realities which should be propelling us all to innovate. We should all be future-focused on changing our models lest we be left behind as the equivalent of those newsreels that now run over and over in a loop of a past quickly fading into distant history.
Web: www.wga.org - www.amptp.org
Kimber VanRy is the Channel Sales Manager at Thought Equity Motion, the world's largest supplier of online motion content, licensing and professional representation services to the agency, entertainment, and corporate production industries.
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