Writers Take On “Corporate Greed” During Rally For A Fair Contract

Katie Campione, Rosy Cordero and Peter White
·4 min read

There’s a festival feel at the La Brea Tar Pits with live performances from Aloe Blacc and Boots Riley.

Blacc said that he was there to sing for the writers and that he wishes “there was more I could do for you” but that he stands in “solidarity”, while Riley performed an acapella song called Everything after saying “the whole world is looking at us and we can’t let them down” (see clips below).

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But while there’s live music, the sense of injustice from the thousand-plus writers attending the WGA Strong March and Rally for a Fair Contract was even louder.

Adam Conover, the WGAW Board and Negotiating Committee Member who organized the event, drew large cheers when he pointed out that the writers were being supported by a slew of other unions, including actors, directors, drivers, janitors and strippers.

“Corporate greed” has been the main message from stage as the strike passes 50 days.

“We’re all in it together, we’re all fighting the same fight, for a sustainable job in the face of corporate greed,” Conover said on stage. “We didn’t plan for all of those yachts to get attacked by orcas… [but] it proves that the sea itself is on our side. There’s an unprecedented level of support that we have never seen before and that is why we’re going to win. We are going to win because [the studios] need us. Writers are the ones who stare at a blank page, we are the ones who invent the characters, tell the stories and write the jokes that their audiences love, they’d have nothing without us, every dollar they make begins with us and we are going to be out here until they remember that.”

WGA board member Liz Alper, who has written on The Rookie and Chicago Fire, said that despite public perception, the majority of Hollywood writers have been historically middle class.

“When streamers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Apple came into our industry, the studios exploited the changing landscape of our business to increase their profits at the expense of our livelihoods,” she said from the tall stage. “The combined revenue of the eight companies at the AMPTP table last year was $1.3 Trillion. It would cost them a quarter of a single percent to restore sustainability to the writers’ careers in Hollywood. What the studios value more than money is power. To allow writers to share in the profits of our work would mean sharing the power the studios hoard so desperately and to the AMPTP, power is a cause worth fighting for, employees are not.”

Former WGA West President David Goodman added that writers were “being crushed under the heel of corporate greed”.

[Today] really just speaks to the fact that the fight that we’re in is not just our fight, that so many people, not just working in our business… recognize that… it sounds cliched, but we’re being crushed under the heel of corporate greed. All we want is a good wage and fair pay for work and that connects with all these other people, all these other workers, all these others,” he told Deadline.

Many other unions were well represented during the event, including Lindsay Dougherty, who runs the Hollywood’s Teamsters Local 399 and has become a breakout voice during the strike.

She told Deadline, “We will continue to support the WGA and their fight with the AMPTP, we all have to remember that the AMPTP, this is their strike, they caused this, they shut down the industry so we all have to stick together. We have to keep going until they get a deal that is fair and just and we will continue to support labor forever.”

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