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SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood Studios Agree to Deal to End Actors’ Strike

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The agreement all but ends one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry. Union members still have to approve the deal.One of the longest labor crises in Hollywood history is finally coming to an end.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, reached a tentative deal for a new contract with entertainment companies on Wednesday, clearing the way for the $134 billion American movie and television business to swing back into motion.Hollywood’s assembly lines have been at a near-standstill since May because of a pair of strikes by writers and actors, resulting in financial pain for studios and for many of the two million Americans — makeup artists, set builders, location scouts, chauffeurs, casting directors — who work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films.Upset about streaming-service pay and fearful of fast-developing artificial intelligence technology, actors joined screenwriters on picket lines in July. The writers had walked out in May over similar concerns. It was the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union and Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films, that actors and writers were both on strike.The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and ended its 148-day strike on Sept. 27. In the coming days, SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether to accept their union’s deal, which includes hefty gains, like increases in compensation for streaming shows and films, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.SAG-AFTRA, however, failed to receive a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Fran Drescher, the union’s president, had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, proposed a new residual for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take.At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history. SAG-AFTRA said in a terse statement that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to approve the tentative deal, which will proceed to the union’s national board on Friday for “review and consideration.”It added, “Further details will be released following that meeting.”Shaan Sharma, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said he had mixed emotions about the tentative deal, though he declined to go into specifics because the SAG-AFTRA board still needed to review it.“They say a negotiation is when both sides are unhappy because you can’t get everything you want on either side,” he said, adding, “You can be happy for the deal overall, but you can feel a sense of loss for something that you didn’t get that you thought was important.”Ms. Drescher, who had been active on social media during the strike, didn’t immediately post anything on Wednesday evening. She and other SAG-AFTRA officials had come under severe pressure from agents, crew member unions and even some of her own members, including George Clooney and Ben Affleck, to wrap up what had started to feel like an interminable negotiation.“I’m relieved,” Kevin Zegers, an actor most recently seen in the ABC show “The Rookie: Feds,” said in an interview after the union’s announcement. “If it didn’t end today, there would have been riots.”The studio alliance said in a statement that the tentative agreement “represents a new paradigm,” giving SAG-AFTRA “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.”There is uncertainty over what a poststrike Hollywood will look like. But one thing is certain: There will be fewer jobs for actors and writers in the coming years, undercutting the wins that unions achieved at the bargaining table.Even before the strikes, entertainment companies were cutting back on the number of television shows they ordered, a result of severe pressure from Wall Street to turn money-losing streaming services into profitable businesses. Analysts expect companies to make up for the pair of pricey new labor contracts by reducing costs elsewhere, including by making fewer shows and canceling first-look deals.The actors, like the writers, said the streaming era had negatively affected their working conditions and compensation.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor the moment, however, the agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant. Early in the talks, for instance, the studio alliance — Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros. — refused to negotiate on multiple union proposals. “Rejected our proposal, refused to make a counter” became a rallying cry among the striking workers.As the studio alliance tried to limit any gains, the companies cited business challenges, including the rapid decline of cable television and continued streaming losses. Disney, struggling with $4 billion in streaming losses in 2022, eliminated 7,000 jobs in the spring.But the alliance underestimated the pent-up anger pulsating among the studios’ own workers. Writers and actors called the moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era had deteriorated the working conditions and compensation for rank-and-file members of their professions so much that they could no longer make a living. The companies brushed such comments aside as union bluster and Hollywood dramatics. They found out the workers were serious.With the strikes dragging into the fall and the financial pain on both sides mounting, the studio alliance reluctantly switched from trying to limit gains to figuring out how to get Hollywood’s creative assembly lines running again — even if that meant bending to the will of the unions.“It was all macho, tough-guy stuff from the companies for a while,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “But that certainly did change.”There had previously been 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood.“The executives of these companies didn’t need to worry about labor very much — they worried about other things,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said in an interview after the writers’ strike concluded. “They worried about Wall Street and their free cash flow, and all of that.”Mr. Keyser continued: “They could say to their labor executives, ‘Do the same thing you’ve been doing year after year. Just take care of that, because labor costs are not going to be a problem.’ Suddenly, that wasn’t true anymore.” As a result of the strikes, studios are widely expected to overhaul their approach to union negotiations, which in many ways dates to the 1980s.Writers Guild leaders called their deal “exceptional” and “transformative,” noting the creation of viewership-based streaming bonuses and a sharp increase in royalty payments for overseas viewing on streaming services. Film writers received guaranteed payment for a second draft of screenplays, something the union had tried but failed to secure for at least two decades.The Writers Guild said the contract included enhancements worth roughly $233 million annually. When bargaining started in the spring, the guild proposed $429 million in enhancements, while studios countered with $86 million, according to the guild.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord takes a meaningful step toward stabilization. About $10 billion in TV and film production has been on hold, according to ProdPro, a production tracking service. That amounts to 176 shows and films.The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Because the actors’ union prohibited its members from participating in promotional campaigns for already-finished work, studios pulled movies like “Dune: Part Two” from the fall release schedule, forgoing as much as $1.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant.With labor harmony restored, the coming weeks should be chaotic. Studio executives and producers will begin a mad scramble to secure soundstages, stars, insurance, writers and crew members so productions can start running again as quickly as possible. Because of the end-of-year holidays, some projects may not restart until January.Both sides will have to go through the arduous process of working together again after a searing six-month standoff. The strikes tore at the fabric of the clubby entertainment world, with actors’ union leaders describing executives as “land barons of a medieval time,” and writers and actors still fuming that it took studio executives months, not weeks, to reach a deal.Workers and businesses caught in the crossfire were idled, potentially leaving bitter feelings toward both sides.And it appears that Hollywood executives will now have to contend with a resurgent labor force, mirroring many other American businesses. In recent weeks, production workers at Walt Disney Animation voted to unionize, as did visual-effects workers at Marvel.Contracts with powerful unions that represent Hollywood crews will expire in June and July, and negotiations are expected to be fractious.“It seemed apparent early on that we were part of a trend in American society where labor was beginning to flex its muscles — where unions were beginning to reassert their power,” said Mr. Keyser, the Writers Guild official.Brooks Barnes More

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    Amid Strikes, One Question: Are Employers Miscalculating?

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    UPS, the Hollywood studios and the Detroit automakers appear to have been taken aback by the tactics and tougher style adopted by new union leaders.The list of gains that the Hollywood writers secured to end a nearly five-month strike with studios once seemed ludicrously ambitious: not just wage increases, but also minimum staffing levels for shows, new royalties on successful series and restrictions on outsourcing writing duties to artificial intelligence.Yet far from an anomaly, the writers’ deal was the latest high-profile labor standoff that seemed to produce substantial gains for workers, and to suggest that they have more leverage than in the past.United Parcel Service employees won large pay increases for part-timers by pushing the company to the brink of a strike, while the lowest-paid academic student employees at the University of California won salary increases of more than 50 percent after a monthlong strike affected thousands of students.Given the unions’ apparent bargaining power and the economic costs to a prolonged work stoppage, the question arises: Why wouldn’t management make its eventual concessions more quickly?The answer, many union and management experts say, is that employers are increasingly miscalculating — acting from a template that applied in previous decades, when employees had little leverage, and underestimating the frustration and resolve in the postpandemic work force.“Psychologically, it’s a big shift: They’ve been in control. They have been able to tell their representatives to go and get concessions on X and Y, to make sure the wage increase is modest,” said Thomas Kochan, an emeritus management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referring to corporate executives.“Now, they have to change their expectations internally,” Dr. Kochan added. “They have a lot of work to do.”In example after example, executives appear to have been taken aback by unions’ new, more assertive leaders and their success at rallying members and the public, as well as the ineffectiveness of the employers’ traditional bargaining approach.Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, right, attacked UPS over what the union referred to as “part-time poverty” jobs.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesIn Hollywood, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents entertainment companies in negotiations with writers, directors and actors, has frequently tried to forge a deal with one of the three guilds, then push the other two to accept similar terms.That appeared to be the group’s strategy this year as well: After the writers went on strike in May, the alliance reached a deal with directors the next month. But any hope that the writers would be isolated collapsed when SAG-AFTRA, the union representing more than 150,000 actors, went on strike in July.“The playbook was clearly outdated,” said Peter Newman, a longtime independent producer who heads a dual-degree master’s program in business and fine arts at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.Still, Mr. Newman said, the strikes saved the studios hundreds of millions of dollars on shows in the short term as Wall Street was pressuring them to cut costs.The producers’ alliance declined to comment for this article.In Detroit, the three major U.S. automakers had grown accustomed to closed-door negotiations with the United Automobile Workers union, in which the parties did not disclose the potential terms until they reached an overall agreement.But in the run-up to this year’s mid-September strike deadline, the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, appeared to wrong-foot executives at Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis — which makes the Chrysler and Jeep brands — by disclosing and deriding the companies’ offers. In one case, he literally threw a Stellantis proposal in the garbage.Automakers have expressed impatience with the leadership style of Shawn Fain, center, the United Automobile Workers union leader.Cydni Elledge for The New York TimesThe companies’ responses — a Stellantis executive sent employees a letter saying that “theatrics and personal insults will not help,” while Ford and G.M. have also expressed impatience — may have further galvanized members and built public support. Polls have found that the public supports the autoworkers over the companies by large margins, and that the margins increased after the U.A.W. began a limited strike.“It doesn’t seem like they were prepared for the direction he was headed with his public comments,” David Pryzbylski, a labor lawyer who represents employers at Barnes & Thornburg, said of the reaction to Mr. Fain. “The way they have responded may have escalated it further versus letting it die out.”Stellantis declined to comment. Auto industry executives argue that they have made historically generous offers, and that they haven’t been put off by Mr. Fain’s outspokenness so much as what they say are the showmanship and the unrealistic expectations he has created.Mr. Pryzbylski emphasized that it was too early to tell whether the landscape had tilted to labor’s advantage for the longer term, or just temporarily. The outcome of the U.A.W. strike remains unclear, and the workers’ resolve could diminish if the strike drags on for weeks. Talks between the sides are ongoing.Other management-side lawyers said that while a handful of executives might have miscalculated of late, there was no broader trend in this direction. They say that employers remain capable of assessing and acting in their self-interest, and that unions are equally capable of miscalculating.“People are sophisticated on both sides,” said Marshall Babson, a longtime management-side lawyer and former member of the National Labor Relations Board. “From my experience, good negotiators don’t get distracted by pyrotechnics.”But in many cases, what has changed is not so much the bluster from union leaders as their willingness to follow through — a potentially disruptive shift after years of often empty threats.When Sean O’Brien, the Teamsters president, ran to succeed his longtime predecessor, James P. Hoffa, in 2021, he promised to raise wages for part-time workers at UPS, many of whom had long felt shortchanged.And yet, according to two people close to the negotiations, the company seemed caught off guard when talks broke down over the issue on July 5 — Mr. O’Brien’s initial deadline.Mr. O’Brien and the union spent the next few weeks publicly attacking UPS over what the union referred to as “part-time poverty” jobs before the company agreed to hourly wage increases for part-timers of more than $7.50 over the life of the new five-year contract.The chief executive of UPS, Carol Tomé, said the company had expected contract talks this year “to be late and loud, and they were.”Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesShortly after a tentative deal was reached in late July, the UPS chief executive, Carol Tomé, said the company had expected the negotiations “to be late and loud, and they were.” The company declined to comment for this article.Part of the challenge for employers is public opinion: Confidence in big business is at its lowest point in decades, according to Gallup, while approval of labor unions is close to its highest. Mr. Fain and Mr. O’Brien appear to have devised their public campaigns to press this advantage.Unions also appear to have benefited from new methods of keeping members focused on shared goals — as when writers erupted on social media over the news that the talk show hosted by Drew Barrymore would return before the strike ended. (Ms. Barrymore soon reversed course.)And rank-and-file members appear to have become more committed to their leaders’ negotiating strategy as unions have become more democratic and involved members more in the push for a contract, said Jane McAlevey, a longtime labor organizer and scholar.But perhaps most important, employers seem to be underestimating the determination of workers, who believe they have little to lose from striking amid rising prices and fundamental shifts in their industry that have sometimes made their jobs more precarious.A few weeks after the writers walked off the job this spring, Mae Smith, a strike captain and former writer on the Showtime series “Billions,” predicted in an interview that the economic pain of a protracted strike against the studios would not discourage the writers because “unfortunately they’ve been training us to live off very few months of work for a long time.”The prediction largely held, in something of a departure from the 2007 writers’ strike. Back then, when streaming felt like a distant threat, there were some splits within the Writers Guild over how aggressive to be, said Chris Keyser, a past president of the union.This time, the writers appeared particularly unified by the looming role of artificial intelligence, an issue on which the studios largely refused to engage for months.“A number of C.E.O.s, when we talked to them later about A.I., said that was a mistake,” recalled Mr. Keyser, a co-chair of the writers’ negotiating committee this year.(The writers did compromise on some key issues in the end — there is no ban on studios’ use of scripts they own to train A.I. tools, though the guild reserved the right to challenge instances of this.)Dr. Kochan of M.I.T. said the concession from studios on artificial intelligence was especially significant because it highlighted another shift: employers’ diminished ability to limit negotiations to conventional issues like wages and benefits while often reserving the right to control other aspects of the job, like technology adoption.“For decades, management has been able to say: ‘These are our decisions, our prerogatives. It’s none of your business,’” he said.With the breakthrough on artificial intelligence, he added, “this is a new day — that’s why the writers’ strike was so important.” More

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    Impact of Hollywood Strikes on Jobs Goes Beyond the Strikers

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    Walkouts by screenwriters and actors have meant less work in fields that cater to the TV and film industry.One reason the August employment report wasn’t stronger: Television and movie production has largely halted since a deadlock in contract negotiations between major studios and unions that represent screenwriters and actors.The motion picture and sound recording industry subtracted 16,800 jobs in August. That’s not a huge share of its approximately 438,000-person work force, but it underestimates the total impact of the labor stoppages, given how much spending power the film industry creates in Los Angeles specifically.The shutdown started when 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May. In the second quarter alone, according to Los Angeles’s film office, activity was down 28.8 percent from a year earlier.The stoppages spread when SAG-AFTRA, which represents more than 160,000 actors and broadcasters, struck in July after its contract with the largest film and television studios expired.Striking actors and writers, however, don’t translate one for one into payrolls. For one thing, many of SAG-AFTRA’s members work for television news stations and aren’t on strike. Those who do act in movies and TV shows usually sign contracts, sometimes for a day or a week, rather than entering into a continuing employment relationship.Between intermittent gigs, they’re used to taking second jobs, like waiting on tables or designing websites. During the strike, they’re also allowed to work in theater and commercials, as well as on a handful of independent projects that have agreed to abide by the union’s demands.Even with no work, most earn at least some money through residuals — although that revenue has shrunk with the rise of streaming, and will fade as the months drag on.“We’re used to being freelancers, and just being able to go along,” said Jodi Long, president of SAG-AFTRA’s Los Angeles local. “For now, what’s really going to affect the job market is the people on set — the hair and makeup people, the gaffers and the grips and the people in production.”Ms. Long is right: The support services required to make movies and shows have largely shut down. Some serve other industries as well, but many have grown up around the needs of film production. Even if the industry becomes very busy when the strike ends as studios restock their pipelines, months of income will be hard to replace.Take Limelight Catering. Its owner, Steve Michelson, mostly mothballed the business in May when the writers’ strike started, laying off 50 staff members, nearly all of them represented by the Teamsters. Since then, he has been repairing trucks and doing other maintenance at his facility in the northern reaches of the Los Angeles area.“We’re kind of the side effect,” Mr. Michelson said. “We depend on the film industry, but we get nothing out of this. The actors and the writers, hopefully they’ll get a nice raise, but we get nothing out of it.”Unlike striking workers in California, those who lose their jobs as collateral damage of labor disputes are eligible for unemployment insurance. (New York State does allow workers on strike to collect unemployment checks.)That’s what most of Mr. Michelson’s workers are doing. Many of those who were in more physical jobs, like carrying heavy cameras and lights around, are using the time to take care of occupational injuries by claiming disability benefits.Bill Bridges, a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, has worked as a grip for 25 years. Getting through the Covid-19 shutdown was hard enough, he said, and then he needed a year off for a total knee replacement. During that time, Mr. Bridges became licensed to drive a truck, and applied for jobs with the long-haul freight lines — but he said they paid only $650 a week for someone with no experience.After recovering from surgery, he was able to drive film trucks, and sometimes earned $1,600 a day. That stopped when the talent went on strike. This time, he’s back on disability to get bunion surgery.Mr. Bridges supports the strikers, but said he was way behind on bills, barely sustaining his wife and 11-year-old son. The union has started a mutual aid food pantry and a GoFundMe appeal for its members.“This is probably financially the lowest point in my life,” he said. He worries about his own union’s contract negotiations, coming up next year: “If there’s another strike, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” More

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    How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

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    The writers say Hollywood studios are increasingly limiting their roles in television productions, highlighting a trend for white-collar workers.For the six years he worked on “The Mentalist,” beginning in 2009, Jordan Harper’s job was far more than a writing gig. He and his colleagues in the writers’ room of the weekly CBS drama were heavily involved in production. They weighed in on costumes and props, lingered on the set, provided feedback to actors and directors. The job lasted most of a year.But by 2018, when he worked on “Hightown,” a drama for Starz, the business of television writing had changed substantially. The writers spent about 20 weeks cranking out scripts, at which point most of their contracts ended, leaving many to scramble for additional work. The job of overseeing the filming and editing fell largely to the showrunner, the writer-producer in charge of a series.“On a show like ‘The Mentalist,’ we’d all go to set,” Mr. Harper said. “Now the other writers are cut free. Only the showrunner and possibly one other writer are kept on board.”The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. Mr. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago.While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further.SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike last week, said its members had also felt the effects of the streaming era. While many acting jobs had long been shorter than those of writers, the union’s executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said studios’ “extreme level of efficiency management” had led shows to break roles into smaller chunks and compress character story lines.But Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it.In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.Over time, said Dr. Resnikoff, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, “you get this tiered work force of prestige workers and lesser workers” — fewer officers, more grunts. The writers’ experience shows how destabilizing that change can be.The strategy of breaking up complex jobs into simpler, lower-paid tasks has roots in meatpacking and manufacturing. At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems — ignition, axles, transmission.By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast assembly line. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and over.For decades, making television shows was similar in some ways to the early days of automaking: A team of writers would be involved in all parts of the production. Many of those who wrote scripts were also on set, and they often helped edit and polish the show into its final form.The “all around” approach had multiple benefits, writers say. Not least: It improved the quality of the show. “You can write a voice in your head, but if you don’t hear it,” said Erica Weiss, a co-showrunner of the CBS series “The Red Line,” “you don’t actually know if it works.”Ms. Weiss said having her writers on the set allowed them to rework lines after the actors’ table read, or rewrite a scene if it was suddenly moved indoors.She and other writers and showrunners said the system also taught young writers how to oversee a show — essentially grooming apprentices to become the master craftspeople of their day.But it is increasingly rare for writers to be on set. As in manufacturing, the job of making television shows is being broken down into more discrete tasks.In most streaming shows, the writers’ contracts expire before the filming begins. And even many cable and network shows now seek to separate writing from production. “It was a good experience, but I didn’t get to go to set,” said Mae Smith, a writer on the final season of the Showtime series “Billions.” “There wasn’t money to pay for me to go, even for an established, seven-season show.”Showtime did not respond to a request for comment. Industry analysts point out that studios have felt a growing need to rein in spending amid the decline of traditional television and pressure from investors to focus on profitability over subscriber growth.In addition to the possible effect on a show’s quality, this shift has affected the livelihoods of writers, who end up working fewer weeks a year. Guild data shows that the typical writer on a network series worked 38 weeks during the season that ended last year, versus 24 weeks on a streaming series — and only 14 weeks if a show had yet to receive a go-ahead. About half of writers now work in streaming, for which almost no original content was made just over a decade ago.Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since May.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMany have seen their weekly pay dwindle as well. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee, said studios had traditionally paid writers well above the minimum weekly rate negotiated by the union as compensation for their role as producers — that is, for creating a dramatic universe, not just completing narrow assignments.But as studios have severed writing from production, they have pushed writers’ pay closer to the weekly minimum, essentially rolling back compensation for producing. According to the guild, roughly half of writers were paid the weekly minimum rate last year — about $4,000 to $4,500 for a junior writer on a show that has received a go-ahead and about $7,250 for a more senior writer — up from one-third in 2014.Writers also receive residual payments — a type of royalty — when an episode they write is reused, as when it is licensed into syndication, but say opportunities for residuals have narrowed because streamers typically don’t license or sell their shows. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in its statement that the writers’ most recent contract had increased residual payments substantially.(Actors receive residuals, too, and say their pay has suffered in other ways: The streaming era creates longer gaps between seasons, during which regular characters aren’t paid but often can’t commit to other projects.)The combination of these changes has upended the writing profession. With writing jobs ending more quickly, even established writers must look for new ones more frequently, throwing them into competition with their less-experienced colleagues. And because more writing jobs pay the minimum, studios have a financial incentive to hire more-established writers over less-established ones, preventing their ascent.“They can get a highly experienced writer for the same price or just a little more,” said Mr. Harper, who considers himself fortunate to have enjoyed success in the industry.Writers also say studios have found ways to limit the duration of their jobs beyond walling them off from production.Many junior writers are hired for a writers’ room only to be “rolled off” before the room ends, leaving a smaller group to finish the season’s scripts, said Bianca Sams, who has worked on shows including the CBS series “Training Day” and the CW program “Charmed.”“If they have to pay you weekly, at a certain point it becomes expensive to keep people,” Ms. Sams said. (The wages of junior writers are tied more closely to weeks of work rather than episodes.)The studios have chafed at writers’ description of their work as “gig” jobs, saying that most are guaranteed a certain number of weeks or episodes, and that they receive substantial health and pension benefits.But many writers fear that the long-term trend is for studios to break up their jobs into ever-smaller pieces that are stitched together by a single showrunner — the way a project manager might knit together software from the work of a variety of programmers. Some worry that eventually writers may be asked to simply rewrite chatbot-generated drafts.“I think the endgame is creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible,” said Zayd Dohrn, a Writers Guild member who oversees the screen and stage master’s degree program at Northwestern University, “and having one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.”He added, “It’s the way coders write code — in the most drone-like way.” More