If you live in the USA, you’re no doubt being inundated with the news that the WGA writers are on strike. Garbage. The writers are not on strike. They’re just walking up and down the streets on New York and LA hoping that the TV and movie studios will pay them more money for doing nothing.That’s right. Even though writers make several hundred thousand dollars a year for sitting in front of a word processor and “processing words,” they want to be paid each time somebody downloads their work from the Internet or buys a DVD. Ridiculous! How will the studios make money if they have to pay writers every time THEY earn a dollar?
If you don’t believe me about the writers not being on strike, check out the Speechless Without Writers site, and you’ll see that there’s a huge amount of original material on this site. Who’s writing this stuff? The writers who claim to be on strike. Face facts, if they were really on strike, there’d be nothing on this site. Hypocrites. If writers are prepared to give their stuff to this site for free, they’re overpaid.
Nick Counter, president of the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, summed it up perfectly in Variety when he said writers are not only well paid, they’re also greedy.
“Working writers on average earn over $200,000 a year,” he said. “All they have to do is earn $31,000 to qualify for a full year of coverage in the finest health care plan in the country.”
Wikipedia backs up Counter’s numbers saying that series writers earn a minimum of $75,000 per season and typically write one or two scripts a year at $17,500 per script. When you consider that only 22 to 24 episodes of each TV show are produced each season, a writer could work on two shows per year, take six or eight weeks vacation, and earn $185,000 before residuals—if they weren’t so damn lazy. The average American would kill for a job like this.
Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily points out that while the writers are picketing, employees at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network are doing everything necessary to protect their jobs—even if it means putting their lives on the line.
According to Nikki, teamster Mike Groom was driving a tractor and generator rig for a Fox show when he saw the picket line and refused to cross it. Instead of doing the honorable thing—the job he was being paid to do—Mike parked his truck in the turning lane and sat there for two-and-a-half hours.
If not for the courage of an unnamed Fox employee who knew where his bread was buttered and commandeered the truck, Groom would still be there collecting his salary for doing nothing.
I'm sure Rupert Murdoch will use his influence to track down the unnamed Fox hero who confronted the strikers, stared danger in the face and drove the truck into the Fox lot—putting Mr. Murdoch’s interests in front of his own safety and the needs of the 12,000 striking writers and their families—and present him with the reward he so rightly deserves. If more employees put their employers’ interests first, the TV and movie studios would finally make a profit on all those movies that they CLAIM lose money.
I call on the writers to follow the example of the unnamed Fox worker and return to work. The sooner the writers start processing words again, the happier the media moguls like Mr. Murdoch will be. And as everyone knows, a happy media magnate is a joy to be around.
To stay one step in front of the competition, check out my latest book: Dr. Young’s Guide to Demotivating Employees at Dolyttle & Seamore.
While I don’t really have any interest in hearing what you have to say about anything, if you have a burning desire to get something off your chest, email me: dryoung@demotivationist.com.
