Bionic Woman

If you are a television fan, you have probably read countless articles and blog posts this week talking about how these greedy writers are going to kill your favorite shows. Bionic Woman is definitely going to be shutting down production soon, if it has not already due to the strike, and temporary darkness has already come to the sets of countless other shows.

But keep the faith, friends, and don’t buy in to the misrepresentations of those who would have you believe that these writers are selfish elitists, marching for rich paydays at the expense of hardworking Americans who just want to come home after a long day of work and watch Lost.

In fact, the opposite is true. These are folks are simply trying to get paid for the work that they do. Period. And the studios are expecting them to work for free. It’s that simple.

Right now the writer’s are caught in a bizarre contractual loophole that states that everything that ends up on the internet is a mere “promo.” This means Writer’s Guild of America members are currently not being paid for anything that ends up on the Internet … even while ads are sold around those episodes (an advertisement in the middle of a “promo” - how strange), even while studios are building business models around the recognition that more and more people are watching television on the internet, even while everyone recognizes that it will be the portable internet and not the heavy and unportable television that delivers our entertainment in the decades to come.

As one writer put it, they are not marching for more rights … they are really just trying to maintain the status quo and the basic concept that an honest day’s work leads to an honest day’s pay. Don’t believe the hype that this is about greed, folks. We are talking about simple compensation for work well done, and companies trying to profit off of that work without paying for it.

The concept of being fairly compensated for labor is an issue close to my heart, and it should be close to yours too. The writer’s strike involves issues that are relevant to all of us, because in the past few decades big companies have been doing more and more to ensure that they do not have to pay workers in every industry for their labor. This is an issue I feel passionate about personally and one that I have written about professionally, as that link indicates (it cites to a law review article I wrote about payment issues in the construction industry).

Fair pay for good work is an issue that effects everyone, not just Hollywood writers: if you do work that allows someone else to make profits, you should be paid. It is the basic foundation of our capitalist economy, the concept that created a booming economy for the past two centuries. But there will always be companies that want to boom while their workers go bust, and as workers we should support them today because tomorrow it could be our pay that they are trying to erode. So I support the writers’ attempts to earn eight cents of every $20 DVD that is sold, even if it means I may not see Michelle Ryan and Katee Sackhoff beat each other up again.

To understand a bit more about the issues, take four minutes and watch the very well done You Tube video “Why We Fight” which explains the issues much better than I can. Or watch the very funny clip of the writers from The Office below, which explains the bizarre conundrum of studios labeling an entire episode of a show “a promo.”