On October 16, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union representing 60,000 behind-the-scenes workers in the film industry, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) negotiated their way to a deal.
IATSE workers had declared they’d go on strike if they couldn’t find a satisfactory solution with AMPTP by 12:01 a.m. on October 18. An electoral college made up of workers from thirteen Hollywood locals could still reject the agreement that’s been proposed—and some members plan to do just that.
“We love doing this. We want to be doing this. We would just like to have some semblance of a life outside of it.”
The tentative agreement, which may take several weeks to ratify, provides for a fifty-four-hour weekend and ten-hour turnaround time between shifts. A ten-hour turnaround time means some workers may still end up facing fourteen-hour days; many had hoped for better and campaigned online for shorter days.
IATSE negotiated more humane conditions for members working on streaming productions. Regulations in regard to the treatment and compensation of union workers hired for “new media” productions are much laxer than those on network TV shows and legacy-studio films—because the contracts for these sorts of productions were set when services like Netflix were still upstarts.
Now it’s thirteen years later, and those productions can hardly be considered “new” in any functional sense. Especially since the pandemic, those services have become ubiquitous: Since COVID-19, worldwide streaming subscriptions have surpassed one billion.
New media workers demanded a better deal: guaranteed rest periods, overtime when workweeks exceed sixty hours, guaranteed meal breaks when shoots last all day, and a living wage for all union workers. Under the tentative agreement, the lowest-wage IATSE members will make a living wage, penalties for work during mealtime will be increased, and workers will receive a retroactive 3 percent wage increase annually (which is less than the current inflation rate).
Negotiations are ongoing in non-West Coast production hubs.
The strike vote, which was approved by a near-unanimous margin of union members, shows that film industry workers are ready and willing to demand better.
The @ia_stories Instagram account has been sharing the stories of many of those who voted “yes” to strike in the first place. Marisa, whose last name is omitted for job security, is one of the owners of @ia_stories, and she says that, until recently, most film set workers hardly talked about the problems they were experiencing.
“The experience of working in this industry can feel super isolating, and you can kind of feel gaslit by the industry itself, like, well, this is the norm, I must be the problem, I just can’t handle it,” Marisa explains.
On the Instagram account, an ever-growing audience is watching workers tell their stories, which include falling asleep in their cars, unable to gather the strength to drive home without falling asleep; weeks and months without seeing their families; and collapsing on the job or crashing their cars while driving home exhaustedly from work.
Some media industry workers aren’t able to strike, because they don’t work unionized positions or haven’t been in the industry long enough. As the strike deadline approached, they anxiously watched platforms like @ia_stories.
Twenty-two-year-old Taylor, whose last name is omitted for job security, is a freelance nonunion lights and camera worker who has been in the Hollywood job market for less than a year. Taylor mostly works on a gig-to-gig basis, living with several housemates and working irregular hours.
“The discourse around what’s reasonable to give to your job, what is asking too much, and what is sort of an abusive relationship with a workplace is changing,” they say.
Though they never planned to go on strike—as a non-unionized worker, it wouldn’t make sense to do so—Taylor expresses hope that this is a watershed moment for their industry. They say it could be “more humane for everybody, and better for people like myself who are new—instead of the previous attitude of, well, if you can’t take it, go find another industry. We love doing this. We want to be doing this. We would just like to have some semblance of a life outside of it.”
Mark Wojahn, who has been in film production since the early 1990s, says he learned that it is indeed possible to make blockbuster entertainment without physically and psychologically breaking workers. One example Wojahn remembers is the set of the Coen brothers’ film A Serious Man, where workdays only lasted eight to ten hours because the brothers had done prep work in advance.
“It was a very well organized and creative team,” he says. “That type of production is a little bit different from most productions.”
“There was a lower-budget film that I passed on, and one of the art department workers crashed their car because they were working insane hours. This person survived. I think they had a concussion or something,” Wojahn says. “It does happen when you push people to the limit. I guess I’ve been lucky.”
Marisa says the treatment of film and television industry workers shows how inhumanely they are viewed: “We are cogs in a wheel to be used to max capacity then disposed of for the next project.”
IATSE’s workers, much like the coal miners and John Deere production workers who are on strike in other corners of the country, have the power to bring their industry to a grinding halt—if they can continue to organize collectively. Unlike those in many other industries, film and television crew workers also have the visibility of the media they create on their side. Non-industry onlookers prepared to cancel their Netflix and Amazon subscriptions in solidarity, and people joked on TikTok and Twitter that folks should brush up on their media piracy skills.
“We will not continue to be treated like disposable machines,” Marisa vows. “We are people.”