Why are you striking?
Jones: One, because I'm experiencing such high levels of discrimination and wage theft, but I know it's only going to get worse for the people that are coming behind me. I want to make sure that they don't have to experience what we are fighting against and that we can open more doors. Because there's already a huge barrier to entry to film and television for people who don't come from privilege and money. It takes a long time to break in and you're having to hustle and hustle and hustle. And if you don't have parents that can help you financially, a lot of people end up having to pivot and go to another career because it's not sustainable. So we want to make it so that, at the very least, it's sustainable once you get your foot in the door.
"It is wild in terms of how unable writers are to create and maintain a sustainable livable wage."
Fontana: I've loved TV and film since I was a little kid. Times and conditions change in every aspect of our society, but I think a mistake that some folks are coming to is this thinking that it's a bunch of elitist Hollywood mucky-mucks going, "I want more pay even though I'm already rich." The thing that has been sort of obfusticated previous to this fight is that it's actually really hard to make a living in this business at all anymore. I'm not saying like pay a mortgage [hard], it's like, I can't get a mortgage; can barely pay my rent. That has shifted as it has across all of society; it's harder for all of us.
. . . I'm showing up partly because I see how bad it's gotten for all of us. The middle class is hollowed out for everybody across the entirety of the United States. No matter what job you're doing the middle class is disappearing. And in the case of writers, it's making it impossible for the continuum of this job to grow.
There are not enough people coming up from the back end to fill the spots that are showrunners, and people who've been making this work for a long time, they're not getting an opportunity to do that work on sets. And it "happens to" coincide with a period of time where more queer folks, people of colour, and more vulnerable people are coming up the ranks of writers. It's around the same time that they started going, "You know what, we're not going to give you guys all the stuff we used to give everybody else." That is also the same as the rest of the fight and that is highly suspicious to me.
Gómez: The biggest [reasons] in the television space have to do with the length of these writers' rooms and typical broadcast rooms before streaming really came into effect. The majority of those rooms lasted 30 to 40 weeks and what we're seeing right now are these mini rooms that can be as short as six weeks and as long as 20 weeks. Sometimes your shows aren't even guaranteed to be aired, and so these rooms are smaller and smaller.
There's also an incredible amount of inconsistency in terms of levels. Like there's not necessarily a clear pathway anymore. With each room, you get bumped, and with each bump, there's a higher pay. But we're seeing show writers make the same wages as story editors, depending on the context. It is wild in terms of how unable writers are to create and maintain a sustainable livable wage. It has sort of perpetuated this freelance gig economy.