In the 1930s when the Three Stooges started appearing in movies, television was little more than experimental. By the late 1950s when Screen Gems sold a package of their short films to be broadcast on television, the small screen was becoming a dominant form of entertainment. Yet the Stooges didn’t get a dime from syndication. Their business deals hadn’t anticipated a disruptive new technology that allowed their work to be endlessly recycled. Then in 1960, actors joined writers and walked out on Hollywood.
“The 1960 strike was mostly over residuals for television from motion-picture packages that were being sold to television, and tangentially, of course, sitcom syndication as well,” said Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. “This strike covered an argument over motion pictures made from 1948 to 1960, and films before 1948 were actually sold to television without any residuals for anybody because nobody had anticipated this thing called television.” The strike helped establish the modern residuals system, ensuring actors and writers are paid over time for a movie or television show.
Now, for the first time since 1960, Hollywood has been hit with another dual strike. Though the technologies have changed, one basic fact has not: The entertainment industry is rife with a level of exploitation that any American worker may recognize. “What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is happening across all fields of labor,” said SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher as she announced that actors would join the Writers Guild of America on strike this month. She spoke harshly of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: “When employers make Wall Street and greed their priority, they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run.”
New technologies such as streaming and artificial intelligence have created new ways for the AMPTP to profit without paying actors and writers their fair share. SAG-AFTRA says around 87 percent of its members earn less than $26,000 a year from acting, which means residuals can be a lifeboat. Thanks to streaming, though, residuals are rapidly shrinking. In a recent TikTok video, Kimiko Glenn of Netflix’s popular Orange Is the New Black revealed that she had gotten only $27 in foreign residuals over the decade since the show’s premiere.
Actors and writers on the picket line walk a path worn down by previous generations of workers. Whenever Hollywood embraces something new, be it TV, radio, or talkies, “the union and the workers say, okay, how can we capture our fair share” of this “organizational and technological form,” explained Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Every generation, there’s a shifting. These companies, they make money in slightly different ways. So the task of a union’s leadership is to figure that out ahead of time at least, or keep up with it, and to make sure they get their share.”
Doherty told me what happened in 1960 was “similar to what’s going on today, and in a way, it’s similar to what went on in 1980” during the Screen Actors Guild strike that year. “In each case, the actors and the talent are basically trying to get remuneration for a new revenue stream that no one had anticipated when the original contracts were signed.” In 1960, actors and writers won higher salaries, residuals, and the creation of pension, health-care, and welfare funds. Decades later, after the invention of the video cassette tape, actors negotiated to get a slice of that action depending upon the gross. “Basically, you have to watch the producers and the distributors every minute to make sure they’re not cooking the books,” Doherty said, citing the old Hollywood saying that “the most creative people in Hollywood work in the accounting department for the major studios.”
But where Doherty sees similarities, others perceive key differences. “This strike is unlike any previous Hollywood strike,” said Steve Ross, a professor of history at the University of Southern California and the co-director and co-founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. “Earlier strikes by actors and writers focused on obtaining a fair share of the wealth they helped create. That usually meant better pay and a fair share of residuals generated by new technologies.” This strike, he explained, “is about saving their jobs and ability to earn a living.” To Ross, AI “poses an existential threat that could lead to the permanent elimination of a vast number of jobs” as streaming services could use the technology “to replace many actors and writers forever.”
The AMPTP has said it put forward “a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses,” but SAG-AFTRA says that’s not the case. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s chief negotiator, said at a press conference that “they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.” AMPTP spokesperson Scott Rowe disputed this, but his public assurances haven’t mollified anyone — and with good reason. As AI develops and the entertainment industry lavishes money and attention upon it, the technology can look only like a threat.
“That’s why this is likely to be a long strike,” Ross said. “If writers and actors lose this strike, they face losing their ability to work in the industry they love. This is not about greed. It’s about survival.”
This existential quality of the Hollywood strike connects it to other labor struggles past and present. Today’s dual action belongs to a significant moment for American labor, experts say. “This whole year, we’ve had more strikes than usual, and they’re definitely accelerating over the last couple months,” said Sharon Block, a former Biden-administration official and the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. Union density is low in the U.S., but members are mobilized.
“Every situation has its own idiosyncrasies,” Block said. “But I think if you look across, a few dynamics are playing out.” One is a post-pandemic increase in worker activism. “I think these things are contagious, that when workers see other workers in motion — organizing, winning — it spurs more activity and hopefully more winning,” she said. A tight labor market also favors workers on the march: “There are some similarities in some of the workers who are organizing who are working in sectors where there has been a lot of change. And having a union is a way to have a voice in how that change plays out and to make sure the change is happening with you, not just to you.”
Writers and actors aren’t the only workers on strike right now. On July 24, UNITE HERE Local 11 announced that “a third wave of the nation’s largest hotel strike” had expanded to luxury hotels in Beverly Hills. Over 1,000 cooks, dishwashers, room attendants, servers, bellmen, and front-desk agents are on strike, citing low wages amid soaring housing costs. Filadelfia Alcala is on strike, she told me, because the cost of living has gone up. A single mother, she said trips to the market can now cost her hundreds of dollars. Gas has gone up. “And then I have to travel 21 miles going to work, 21 miles coming back. So it’s 42 miles every day that I have to go to work,” she explained.
“It’s frustrating seeing how the hotel where you work, it’s taking good care of our guests and their needs,” she added. “And we’re like, ‘What about us? Why can’t you at least sit and try to give us something we’re asking?’”
There’s a lot of overlap between the hospitality and entertainment industries, and some UNITE HERE Local 11 members also belong to SAG-AFTRA and the WGA as they pursue their dreams of Hollywood success. The three unions are on strike for different reasons, but Alcala sees common threads in their struggles. “We don’t want to depend on having two jobs,” she said. “We want to be able to work only one job and be able to afford your apartment or be able to afford to go somewhere else with your kids without having to worry about, Am I going to have enough money to pay my bills tomorrow?” Drescher’s words echo, and so do the memories of previous Hollywood strikes. Together, they tell an incontrovertible truth: Behind all the glamour, Hollywood is an industry like any other. As such, it exploits workers as much as it can. That’s a common American story, but it’s not carved in stone. Workers are fighting for a different future.
