This Strike Wave Is Rebuilding Workers' Power

This summer, Hollywood writers and actors are out on strike together for the first time in decades. Their demands go beyond wages and benefits—they’re challenging bosses’ authority to unilaterally decide what work looks like.

The eyes of America are on Hollywood this summer, but not for the usual reason: writers and actors for film and TV are shutting down production with their first joint strike since 1960. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), representing 11,500 writers, went on strike May 2 and were joined on the picket line July 14 by the 160,000-strong Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA).

In the public imagination, strikes are often considered to be fights where workers demand better pay or more generous benefits. These are common reasons for strikes, and indeed higher wages and residual payments are among the central demands in the current Hollywood walkout. But strikes are also one of unions’ most powerful weapons for fighting back against business owners and corporate managers who claim the right to run workplaces like private dictatorships.

New York NY USA-July 14, 2023 Members of SAG-AFTRA and other union supporters picket outside the HBOAmazon offices in the Hudson Yards neighborhood in New York

Unions, in other words, need not only use strikes to demand a larger share of the pie that workers produce — they can also wield them to affect how workers make that pie. WGA and SAG-AFTRA are doing that, too, in fighting for contract provisions that shape the nature of the work process. Writers are demanding that studios increase the minimum size of writers’ rooms on TV shows and agree to prohibitions on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the writing process. Actors, meanwhile, want protections against the use of AI-generated likenesses and limits on the use of self-taped auditions.