'It's Now or Never': Writers and Actors See Conflict With Big Tech as Existential

Dozens of SAG-AFTRA members rallied outside Netflix headquarters in Los Gatos on Thursday, protesting declining pay and residuals in the streaming age.

Netflix is just one of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) member companies that SAG-AFTRA is striking against. Others include the major motion picture studios, the principal broadcast television networks, and streaming services like Apple TV+ and Amazon, as well as Netflix.

So why pick on Netflix? The actors said in large part because Netflix is the streaming monster that redefined the entertainment business over the last 16 years, and it continues to dominate today.

“Tech is only going to grow. You know, streaming is only going to grow. So all we’re asking is that we grow with it,” said Rajiv Shah, a member of the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for more than 20 years.

Shah said he’s prepared to stay off movie and TV sets for as long as necessary to extract what he considers an equitable contract from the biggest companies in the business.

“What everybody understands is this is setting a precedent for what’s going to come in the future because you see it in the gig economy and see how people are — their work is being utilized, but not fairly compensated,” he said.

This wouldn’t be the first time Big Tech has gone up against Big Labor in California. In the state Legislature and at the ballot box, the “gig economy” has disrupted multiple labor markets. In stark terms, that’s because the shift to part-time work with minimal employer-provided benefits has taken money out of the pockets of rank-and-file workers and shifted it to the pockets of executives and investors.

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher has said as much in her speeches. “What’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor … Employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run,” she said announcing the strike.

In the latest Netflix earnings call last week, co-CEO Ted Sarandos was careful to note he was raised in a union household before he echoed the party line put forward by the AMPTP. “We’re super committed to getting to an agreement as soon as possible, one that’s equitable, and one that enables the industry and everybody in it, to move forward into the future,” he said.

Last year, Sarandos made $50 million. That’s not nearly as much as the highest-paid CEOs in the U.S., but the storyline of executives making billions while rank-and-file creatives suffer sticks in the craw of Writers Guild of America member Paola Tapia-Limón of Los Angeles. The WGA has been on strike since early May. “My last episode aired a while ago, and I did get residuals. But it’s still a ridiculous amount,” she told KQED.

Even during what’s been called the “golden age” of streaming TV, with the rise of the writer-producer, compensation for most writers has stagnated, according to the WGA.

She added that this has been happening just as Hollywood finally began to diversify in a meaningful way, allowing people like Tapia-Limón to build a middle-class career. “The thought of leaving the industry has definitely crossed my mind in my darkest moments. I’m not going to lie. But I also worked really hard to get here. It’s been over a decade, and I’m a little stubborn,” she said.

What’s different about this struggle

Hollywood producers have played hardball in every labor conflict for more than a century. Tapia-Limón knows “fuzzy accounting” in this business predates the entry of Big Tech. But, Tapia-Limón says, for deep-pocketed companies like Apple and Amazon, entertainment is just one of many things they do.

“There’s always greed … people wanting to make the best products with the least amount of money. But … at least those people respected the art form. The tech companies, they don’t care. It’s just money to them,” Tapia-Limón said.

“It’s sociopathic. It doesn’t make any sense to me. We’re not asking for them to give up their billions,” said Jorge Rivera, vice chair of the Latinx Writers Committee for WGA West. But he added he thinks it’s a mistake to demonize Big Tech alone. Wall Street, he said, and its demand for exponential growth is also playing a major part in the economic disruption of Hollywood.

“You can’t just make a profit. You’ve got to grow that profit every year, and I don’t think that is a sustainable model for entertainment. Yeah, we can make billions a year, but can we multiply that by 100 every year? I don’t think so. That’s what they want,” Rivera said. This is in an era when people spend more time and money on video games than movies, and more time watching YouTube than any TV network.

So what happens next? By many accounts: artificial intelligence. Many writers and actors told KQED they fear they have a limited time before the big companies figure out how to minimize the human contributions to entertainment. The humans figure this is the last time they’ll be in a position to negotiate.