In 1954, the Writers Guild of America formed to bring screenwriters, TV and radio writers under one union umbrella. A few decades later, the labor group expanded its purview by adding animation primetime writers. In three, five or 10 years, could vertical (i.e., iPhone-sized content) writers, YouTubers and other content creators be next?
That’s the vision presented by multiple candidates for this year’s WGA West board and officers election, who are reacting to reduced TV and film hiring with calls for the union to expand. “We are sitting on a shrinking iceberg and must be willing to look beyond our current employers,” vp Michele Mulroney, who is running unopposed to become the union’s president, wrote in her candidate statement. Incumbent board member Adam Conover devoted nearly all of his statement to an organizing narrative, focusing especially on the creator economy. “Like it or not, this is the future of television,” he said of YouTube.
In all, about half of the candidates in this year’s election brought up the need for the union to look beyond film and TV, not just to verticals and YouTube but also podcasts and video games. In 2024, the number of WGA West members reporting earnings was down 24.3 percent compared with 2022, the last comparable year not interrupted by a strike. The union also has disclosed that television writing jobs during the 2023-24 season were down 42 percent from a year earlier.
“Not only does it make sense [for the union to organize], they have to,” says Miranda J. Banks, an associate professor at Loyola Marymount University and author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild. “At this point, film and television work has been so squeezed that writers are seeking employment in all sorts of other places and considering different options. And in that process, they are naturally exploring the boundaries of where entertainment writing is going.”
As logical as it is, this approach represents a pivot for the WGA West, which has been known more for attempts to remake and reform the traditional entertainment industry in recent years than expand outside of it. In contrast, the union’s sibling in New York, the WGA East, has been pushing hard beyond its core areas for more than a decade. Scribes who work at podcasting companies, nonfiction television firms and digital news outlets have all been incorporated into the group since 2011.
To be fair, during the rise of streaming platforms and the height of the so-called “streaming bubble,” the WGA West grew without having to unionize outside its comfort zone. While such streamers as Netflix, Hulu and Paramount+ bulked up their offerings to lure subscribers, the number of WGA West members rose from 21,195 in March 2013 to 26,350 in March 2022, according to documents the union filed with the Department of Labor.
But any organizing efforts aimed at work produced for social media platforms in particular won’t be easy. The creator workforce is diffuse and often isolated, not easy to wrangle under one common goal: For every star that produces scripted entertainment with the help of an entire staff — like Alan Chikin Chow and Dhar Mann (who both now have Burbank studio spaces)— scores of more minor internet personalities toil alone and/or for little profit. Ad dollars are limited, while the creator space is saturated.
And at least a couple of early movements that sought to organize creators have lost steam, notes Brooke Erin Duffy, a Cornell University associate professor who studies labor in social media. “This is such a hyper-individualized space, and so convincing individual creators to see the power they have as a class — not just with each other, but with other entertainers and artists — is going to be what makes an inflection point,” Duffy says.
The burgeoning field of verticals, too, so far has been dominated by platforms that make their products cheaply and quickly, with scripts that might make the Razzies blush. So far, platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox seem to be perfectly content not to exhibit the kind of work produced by A-list writers whom the WGA West represents. In an interview with THR in June, ReelShort CEO Joey Jia (whose platform has 55 million monthly viewers) compared work for verticals versus work for traditional entertainment studios as being akin to, “You work for McDonald’s or for a fancy French restaurant in Palo Alto.”
That could change, especially if more mainstream media players get in the game (TelevisaUnivision revealed a slate of verticals at its upfront in May) but right now the business model is the entertainment industry’s equivalent of fast fashion brands Shein and Temu — quickly produced, responsive to trends and highly disposable.
The WGA West has for some time explored the opportunities in video game writing but has never gone all-in. In fact, in 2021, the union shut down a caucus aimed at organizing those writers. “We’re always willing to be surprised, but we’re not holding our breaths as to whether the WGA will actually commit to organizing game writers,” say writers Nick and Max Folkman (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart), who were members of that caucus, in an emailed statement. “This definitely is something they should have been doing years ago, but even when we were part of the caucus pre-COVID, we did not feel much interest from leadership beyond helping WGA members write games or having studios become signatory members.”
Incumbent board member Rob Forman, himself a video game writer who wrote on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, said in his candidate statement that during his time in leadership he led a committee to explore new ways to break into the industry. But so far another labor group, The Communications Workers of America, has taken pole position on organizing wall-to-wall unions in the video game industry, including writers.
Still, the union will have to tackle these obstacles — if not just to survive then to thrive. “I cannot count how many folks are currently working on vertical shorts, video games, podcasts or writing influencer content,” wrote incumbent WGA West board member Molly Nussbaum in her candidate statement. Perhaps it’s time their union sought out new challenges, too.
“There are usually a few people in those [candidate] statements who are talking about jurisdiction and new areas,” says Banks. “But that so many people are, and that they are both excited and determined in the way that they’re speaking about the potential really highlights how much this is critical to the health of the Writers Guild membership right now.”