Why Hollywood’s labor nightmare won’t end soon: Frustration, fear and mistrust
LA TimesHollywood had hoped its summer of strikes would end by Labor Day, but ongoing talks between the unions and the studios have failed to produce a meaningful breakthrough. WGA members were joined in mid-July by the 160,000-member performers’ union, SAG-AFTRA, after the collapse of its contract talks with the studios, including Walt Disney Co., Netflix, Amazon Studios and Warner Bros. “It increasingly looks like Hollywood will not be back in business until the beginning of 2024, at the earliest,” research firm LightShed Partners said this week in a note to clients, noting that scenario was “an unthinkable outcome when the WGA went on strike in May.” How did the entertainment industry become stuck in labor quicksand? “What we are fighting this time isn’t just about percentages and numbers, how much they’re gonna put in the health plan or the pension plan,” Rasheed Newson, executive producer and co-developer of “Bel-Air,” said at a recent event in San Francisco promoting his debut novel, “My Government Means to Kill Me.” “We are talking about whether or not there is going to be a Writers Guild in 10, 20 years.” But Hollywood’s supporting cast, including many caught in a financial crunch, are becoming desperate for a resolution that would spur the industry back to work. “They’ve got to get something accomplished,” actor Robert Hawkey, a SAG-AFTRA strike captain, said of the negotiators, summing up the mood of many on a boisterous picket line on Sunset Boulevard this week. But the WGA’s negotiating committee said the “loopholes, limitations and omissions” made the offer “toothless.” Times staff writer Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report.