No confidence, no job
CHUN YOUNG-SUNThe author is head of the K-entertainment team at the Joongang Ilbo.
The Writers Guild of America strike is now in its second month. On July 14, the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA went on strike, the first time that the two largest Hollywood unions walked out simultaneously since 1960.
The first-ever large-scale Hollywood strike in 1960 went on for 22 weeks. Negotiations with eight major film productions led to compensation for reruns. Writers’ pension fund and medical insurance system were also introduced.
Since then, Hollywood has experienced a strike whenever content production and the consumption environment changes. Industry workers took collective action to get paid for channel rerun rights in 1981 in the cable television era, for home video profit sharing in 1988, and to deal with the arrival of new media and DVDs in 2007-08.
The biggest issue of this year’s strike is a fair share of profits in online streaming services, most notably Netflix, and thus can be recorded as a “Netflix-triggered strike.” Profits that writers and actors received from networks and cables for movies and broadcasting content reruns are decreasing. They also cannot expect additional income from streaming services, which do not count as reruns.
In writers’ cases, they are concerned about the deterioration of the working environment in the streaming era. The American press is paying attention to how writing is being separated from production. In the past, when one project was launched, writers were engaged on the same project for at least one year, but lately, the contract period has been shortened to about 20 weeks. Writers would join at the beginning of the project, and their contracts ended when they completed the assigned work.
Only a few get to keep the contract throughout the project, while the rest of the writers have to look for more work more frequently. Actors are also concerned about fewer open auditions and supporting actors created by artificial intelligence (AI).
The situation is not limited to the film industry, as technology can considerably reduce much of the work for office jobs. At first glance, it sounds like a sweet deal that humans are finally freed from miscellaneous tasks and only need to do important tasks in the future. For instance, reporters don’t have to do some tasks anymore. Up until just a few years ago, journalists spent a considerable amount of time transcribing recordings from their interviews. Now, if they record it on their smartphone and run it through a text conversion application, the transcription is generated within a minute.
It is convenient, but the number of requisite reporters has also decreased. It seems that the people who lack the confidence to become the leading character or the core workforce have started to worry about their jobs.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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