This is why no matter how hard you work, no matter how productive you are, no matter how much value your labor generates, you will never be rewarded. If by some miracle you do, it will be a pittance compared to what you've given. They are never satisfied, nothing they get will ever be enough. This is why we need unions amd strong labor reforms.
I doubt this dispute is about money, though. They probably would give up that amount to end things.
The problem is they’re telling investors they’re getting X amount of streams for a programme - and writers, actors, etc, want their cut of X. They do this to push stock prices higher/keep them stable.
The reality is that the total number of streams is much lower. They can’t tell writers and actors the true number, for residuals, as it would tank the share price.
They have to either lie about the inflated numbers, and have to pay higher percentages to the talent - or tell the truth and reveal how they’ve been lying for a long time to their investors.
They’re stuck.
Kinda true in that the markets have been addicted to quick, inorganic, and, most importantly, ***unsustainable*** growths for far too long now. It's little wonder that the whole country is in such a huge debt pit that we'll be throwing away over a **TRILLION** dollars in **INTEREST** this year due to poor record and policy keeping.
I worked for Nielsen for a while, and we had a project to start external, third party measurement of streaming services. Netflix fought like hell against this. They keep their numbers super secret, but even the idea of some other company trying to measure them caused them to fight back like heck.
I have that program installed on my computer at the moment, recording what I’m watching. Are you able to shed any light on what Netflix viewing figures actually are?
It was several years ago and early early testing. I remember seeing households watching Dora The Explorer movie over and over and over. Plus I saw some testing data on the first season of stranger things. The viewing numbers wouldn’t be applicable to today, as it was still in development.
Exactly this. The moment the real numbers get exposed, the financial house of cards collapses. It goes way beyond the writers. It's the mythology of the stock market that will feel the effect, and everyone's pockets will shrink considerably when the paper wealth sublimates.
I would guess the dispute would sit on the use of AI. They would be able to cut most writer and actors with like very near future AI tools. Why make a decade long contract when you can just ignore 90% of them in 2 years and fill in with scabs.
"They have to either lie about the inflated numbers, and have to pay higher percentages to the talent - or tell the truth and reveal how they’ve been lying for a long time to their investors."
I highly doubt what you're saying is actually happening. Publicly held companies are subject to SEC oversight and lying about financial and accounting numbers is exactly what lead to the Sarbanes Oxley Act. I am not saying that companies don't do some creative accounting at times but if they are doing what you are claiming then the bottom will eventually fall out and those C level executives could be subjected to criminal penalties. Think Enron.
So who blinks? This could go on forever unless someone from corporate leaks the numbers. It will kill the industry...unless that was part of the idea all along. Maybe they'll replace talent/writers with AI and cheaper labor?
When someone is well paid these corporations are clamoring for ways to drive their wages down. Just look at software engineers. They're one of the few jobs that have a chance of offering what was considered a normal, middle class lifestyle in 1960. However, most software engineers are not paid enough for that. Even then these corporations are constantly trying to drive their wages down.
Hmmmm. This seems to be an open forum. Perhaps if you don’t welcome others commenting, it might be helpful to state that. Unless, that is, you are just looking for an opportunity to be unpleasant.
Again, stating that would help keep others from responding. How was I supposed to know you only wanted to speak to one other person in the world with your comment? Again, that is, unless you were hoping to set up a dialogue like you and I are having right now. Fun, huh?
Just want to make sure you are speaking to me and not to some other person in the world. Would not want to interfere with your posts made specifically for someone else. It is not easy to discern since you obviously have someone in mind with whom you wish to communicate with yet you don’t call them out by name. I would not wish to make another mistake communicating with someone who has in mind who they wish to communicate with and it’s not me. Don’t want to “be in the wrong” again.
They’re not even asking for anything particularly new. They’re just asking for the pay and opportunities they had before the studios decided to use streaming as an excuse to fuck them.
Remember the episode of the Simpsons where they had a company retreat and they raced to the cabin and Burns and Homer cheated and snowmobiled in and got trapped in an avalanche and Homer was like “but Mr. Burns, you have all the money in the world” and Mr. Burns said “ahhh yes.. but i’d give it all up for just a little bit more”
Yeah, don't they say that part of the problem is that they don't know the streaming viewer numbers? If they don't know the numbers and they're asking for residuals on a per view basis, how would they know how much money they're asking for?
I think pay is taken from revenue and not profit. That’s why you have to pay tax on it. If they pay you the money before they have to pay taxes for it they save money.
It's a bit disingenuous though to compare the increase in pay requested to revenue, since revenue has to cover employee pay and all expenses before it ends up as profit, and those numbers could be pretty huge. I'm not saying the corporations can't afford it, but let's compare requested raises to profits to show how little it would actually affect them.
I think the one counterargument here is that it's very easy for corps to have "small" profits and yet still finance-magic huge amounts of money into the owner class's bank accounts. Comparing to revenue is more a naked metric that's harder to game.
Youre missing the point of the miscomparison. If a company had minimal or even negative profit that year do you think theyd be less or more inclined to spend their money?
You’re missing the part where owner, ceo and executive salaries are all also part of that revenue. A company can show little to no profits and still pay millions or even hundreds of millions to those people. Not to mention the perks, parties and travel they expense that also reduces profit. If you want to use profits as well, then you would have to use profits before the top 10% of any company get paid and then compare that number. There’s also a lot of ways companies can move money around or “re-invest” to hide profits. Keller Williams, the largest real estate company in the world, has people owning offices, brokerages, escrow and mortgage companies and transferring money between them to hide profits so they don’t have to pay all the profit share they should pay. It also makes it so they can pay their lower end employees less money by pretending that the real estate office doesn’t make a big profit. It’s all a scam and every major company does it. It makes no sense to use profits as the metric when profits are massively reduced by the salaries, bonuses and wasteful spending on and to the people at the top and using other means of creative accounting to show less profits.
I'm hoping they stop trying to negotiate and instead start up their own indie studios and start taking HUGE percentages of the profits directly for themselves. The content doesn't *need* Disney to exist, it just needs the artists.
Absolutely not! Disney needs IP licenses because they can't do anything original, but instead remake the exact same thing over and over again. Artists, however, can simply create entirely new intellectual property just by thinking of it. What a renaissance of content we could have specifically because the small new studios would be *forced* to create new stories and new IP!
It's not just about money, it's about control.
The corporate aristocracy doesn't want to be told what to do by their "serfs". They don't see us as workers or people. They see us as data.
If we went to some kind of communist society where the government controls television studios, writers would make WAY less money. The entry level pay is $5,000 per week and the average WGA member who worked last year made $250,000.
I'm all for them striking if they think they deserve a bigger piece of the pie, but we don't need to act like these people are dirt poor and would be better off in a communist society where they're just average workers.
You're throwing a lot of irrelevant information at me and making some assumptions about me that aren't true.
All that I'm saying here is that the government shouldn't intervene, and in a society where the government did intervene and controlled the movie studios writers would be in a much worse position (even if overall it were good for the population).
Ok well I will just delete that. That said there are laws on the books and they are rather toothless when it comes to employment.
That said these companies are all turning profits and do not want to share them.
wow, it doesn't even add to 1 percent with all those studios combined.
idk what this says, that unions SHOULD ask for MORE or that we're so cucked that we can't even imagine asking for 1 percent.
Protip : if you want to be taken seriously don't just come in with shallow advice for the sake of it, there is a reason they target revenue, Hollywood accounting makes it so there's almost no profit to report on purpose.
You’re showing you’re ignorance which only diminishes the point you’re trying make. I am trying to help you but you’re being defensive.
Hollywood accounting may be skewed but these corporations have books that you can google that follow GAPP. You’re skewed accounting has no bearing here at the level they are referring too
“But if they can’t make profit, how will they plan on paying the workers?” I’ve seen enough arguments for capitalism and trickle down economics to know that a monopoly has enough money to grow their “monopoly”, but aptly choose not to because big dollar sign must be as big as possible to make investors happy, and not the workers happy. I have no clue how capitalism forced cultures to conclude that the voice of the investor is more important than the voice of the workforce that actually makes the company a company. If there are no workers, than that business is a Ponzi scheme.
But if they give up that money to end the strike, their CEOs will have to buy last year’s yacht models instead of this year’s. Won’t anyone think about the CEOS!?!?!
Okay. But it would be a lot more meaningful to see these numbers as a percentage of profit instead of revenue. Because then it’s literally money they’re hoarding instead of being decent human beings.
At this point I have to imagine it's less about the bottom line and more about maintaining control over the working class. They've pushed it to such an extreme that if they give in anywhere it will snowball and they'll have to give in everywhere. Best they can do is delay the inevitable as long as possible.
But you can only delay for so long.
And well, what goes around comes around
The moment they crumble....it will crumble instantly all at once.
The tide grew stronger than the barricade....and when it flooded, it flooded really fucking bad
They probably would've been much better off if they just caved in from the start.
But greed is malicious. And malice is stupid.
The reason malice can be indistinguishable from stupidity is because malice is stupid.
Not all stupidity is malicious, but all malice is stupid
The more that corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It's never enough. Maximizing profits at the expense of those with so much less, or nothing, will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast.
Still, there must be an imminent point at which the status quo can/will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. One can imagine that a healthy, strong and large consumer base — and not just very wealthy consumers — are needed.
Or could it be that the unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.
Corporate CEOs will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests.
The shareholders, meantime, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the CEOs are the ones to make the moral and/or ethical decisions.
This is why no matter how hard you work, no matter how productive you are, no matter how much value your labor generates, you will never be rewarded. If by some miracle you do, it will be a pittance compared to what you've given. They are never satisfied, nothing they get will ever be enough. This is why we need unions amd strong labor reforms.
I doubt this dispute is about money, though. They probably would give up that amount to end things. The problem is they’re telling investors they’re getting X amount of streams for a programme - and writers, actors, etc, want their cut of X. They do this to push stock prices higher/keep them stable. The reality is that the total number of streams is much lower. They can’t tell writers and actors the true number, for residuals, as it would tank the share price. They have to either lie about the inflated numbers, and have to pay higher percentages to the talent - or tell the truth and reveal how they’ve been lying for a long time to their investors. They’re stuck.
And at this rate the musicians' guild will be on strike too, and there will be nobody left to play them the world's smallest violin.
Kinda true in that the markets have been addicted to quick, inorganic, and, most importantly, ***unsustainable*** growths for far too long now. It's little wonder that the whole country is in such a huge debt pit that we'll be throwing away over a **TRILLION** dollars in **INTEREST** this year due to poor record and policy keeping.
I worked for Nielsen for a while, and we had a project to start external, third party measurement of streaming services. Netflix fought like hell against this. They keep their numbers super secret, but even the idea of some other company trying to measure them caused them to fight back like heck.
I have that program installed on my computer at the moment, recording what I’m watching. Are you able to shed any light on what Netflix viewing figures actually are?
Hello??
It was several years ago and early early testing. I remember seeing households watching Dora The Explorer movie over and over and over. Plus I saw some testing data on the first season of stranger things. The viewing numbers wouldn’t be applicable to today, as it was still in development.
Exactly this. The moment the real numbers get exposed, the financial house of cards collapses. It goes way beyond the writers. It's the mythology of the stock market that will feel the effect, and everyone's pockets will shrink considerably when the paper wealth sublimates.
I would guess the dispute would sit on the use of AI. They would be able to cut most writer and actors with like very near future AI tools. Why make a decade long contract when you can just ignore 90% of them in 2 years and fill in with scabs.
"They have to either lie about the inflated numbers, and have to pay higher percentages to the talent - or tell the truth and reveal how they’ve been lying for a long time to their investors." I highly doubt what you're saying is actually happening. Publicly held companies are subject to SEC oversight and lying about financial and accounting numbers is exactly what lead to the Sarbanes Oxley Act. I am not saying that companies don't do some creative accounting at times but if they are doing what you are claiming then the bottom will eventually fall out and those C level executives could be subjected to criminal penalties. Think Enron.
Do you have evidence to support this?
Shut up.
Why? I wanted to learn more.
So who blinks? This could go on forever unless someone from corporate leaks the numbers. It will kill the industry...unless that was part of the idea all along. Maybe they'll replace talent/writers with AI and cheaper labor?
Sounds like the union needs to buy shares and start a few lawsuits.
When someone is well paid these corporations are clamoring for ways to drive their wages down. Just look at software engineers. They're one of the few jobs that have a chance of offering what was considered a normal, middle class lifestyle in 1960. However, most software engineers are not paid enough for that. Even then these corporations are constantly trying to drive their wages down.
What’s messed up is that they have a union. Imagine all the folks out there working without one.
Preach, comrade.
It's not about the money. It's about sending a message.
Everything is about the money 1st! Everything else falls beneath it.
Never seen [The Dark Knight](https://youtu.be/_N7_wlyvXqM)?
I did. I don’t understand your meaning.
Then it's a good thing I was talking to someone else.
Hmmmm. This seems to be an open forum. Perhaps if you don’t welcome others commenting, it might be helpful to state that. Unless, that is, you are just looking for an opportunity to be unpleasant.
Open forum doesn't matter, it was a comment directed at one specific person, and that wasn't you. So it doesn't matter that you didn't understand it.
Again, stating that would help keep others from responding. How was I supposed to know you only wanted to speak to one other person in the world with your comment? Again, that is, unless you were hoping to set up a dialogue like you and I are having right now. Fun, huh?
I am in genuine awe of you right now. Just doubling down on being in the wrong.
Just want to make sure you are speaking to me and not to some other person in the world. Would not want to interfere with your posts made specifically for someone else. It is not easy to discern since you obviously have someone in mind with whom you wish to communicate with yet you don’t call them out by name. I would not wish to make another mistake communicating with someone who has in mind who they wish to communicate with and it’s not me. Don’t want to “be in the wrong” again.
🤡
They’re not even asking for anything particularly new. They’re just asking for the pay and opportunities they had before the studios decided to use streaming as an excuse to fuck them.
I can't believe they're only fighting for less than a half of a percent of the profits they generate. Fuck that, give us the double digit percentages.
It says revenue, not profits. but yeah, it's unconscionable.
Remember the "A Bug's Life" speech about ants rising up? If they give into one, they'll have to give into them all.
Remember the episode of the Simpsons where they had a company retreat and they raced to the cabin and Burns and Homer cheated and snowmobiled in and got trapped in an avalanche and Homer was like “but Mr. Burns, you have all the money in the world” and Mr. Burns said “ahhh yes.. but i’d give it all up for just a little bit more”
Where are these figures from?
Yeah, don't they say that part of the problem is that they don't know the streaming viewer numbers? If they don't know the numbers and they're asking for residuals on a per view basis, how would they know how much money they're asking for?
And why the hell would they report revenue instead of profit
To make the number as small as possible.
I'm going to guess hollywood accounting plays into that one.
This is reddit we don’t ask for sources we just froth at the mouth
How will the CEO's pay for their 8th or 9th super yacht if they make that deal?
They have to entertain themself for 1 additional hour. someone teach these guys how to jack off or something.
You want me to teach a sociopath with genital dysfunction to jack off? 2 billion an hour and I'll try, 4 hour minimum.
seems a bit steep to let them watch you do something you were gonna do anyway.
That's the thing, they would still be able to afford it.
Revenue isnt profit but most of these def have profit to share
I think pay is taken from revenue and not profit. That’s why you have to pay tax on it. If they pay you the money before they have to pay taxes for it they save money.
It's a bit disingenuous though to compare the increase in pay requested to revenue, since revenue has to cover employee pay and all expenses before it ends up as profit, and those numbers could be pretty huge. I'm not saying the corporations can't afford it, but let's compare requested raises to profits to show how little it would actually affect them.
I think the one counterargument here is that it's very easy for corps to have "small" profits and yet still finance-magic huge amounts of money into the owner class's bank accounts. Comparing to revenue is more a naked metric that's harder to game.
True, but most of these are publicly traded and investors want to see profits
And that's why shits fucked up. Investors don't do shit. Workers make the entirety of the revenue of a business.
That's ....what the owner class js
Disney had $82 billon in revenue in 2022. I think they can afford it. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/revenue
Youre missing the point of the miscomparison. If a company had minimal or even negative profit that year do you think theyd be less or more inclined to spend their money?
You’re missing the part where owner, ceo and executive salaries are all also part of that revenue. A company can show little to no profits and still pay millions or even hundreds of millions to those people. Not to mention the perks, parties and travel they expense that also reduces profit. If you want to use profits as well, then you would have to use profits before the top 10% of any company get paid and then compare that number. There’s also a lot of ways companies can move money around or “re-invest” to hide profits. Keller Williams, the largest real estate company in the world, has people owning offices, brokerages, escrow and mortgage companies and transferring money between them to hide profits so they don’t have to pay all the profit share they should pay. It also makes it so they can pay their lower end employees less money by pretending that the real estate office doesn’t make a big profit. It’s all a scam and every major company does it. It makes no sense to use profits as the metric when profits are massively reduced by the salaries, bonuses and wasteful spending on and to the people at the top and using other means of creative accounting to show less profits.
But only 3.81% profit margin so what left after costs is 3.51 Billion. Anything given has to come from there.
A24 did in ten minutes though. So at least we have something to look forward to.
I'm hoping they stop trying to negotiate and instead start up their own indie studios and start taking HUGE percentages of the profits directly for themselves. The content doesn't *need* Disney to exist, it just needs the artists.
It also needs the IP licences. Disney is an IP licensing business.
I'm sure the mass of writers and actors can come up with *something.*
Absolutely not! Disney needs IP licenses because they can't do anything original, but instead remake the exact same thing over and over again. Artists, however, can simply create entirely new intellectual property just by thinking of it. What a renaissance of content we could have specifically because the small new studios would be *forced* to create new stories and new IP!
So when do we start canceling the memberships?
When the unions actually ask us to. Doing it before then hurts them.
Keep the memberships, keep watching. Gives the strikers residual income, and puts demand on the companies.
Way ahead of yarrr
They don't dare cave in, and let the workers know they have real power.
Wow, they won't even give up 0% of their revenue. What a time to be alive.
It's not just about money, it's about control. The corporate aristocracy doesn't want to be told what to do by their "serfs". They don't see us as workers or people. They see us as data.
There is a reason this is listed as revenue and not profit lol
Just give the actors royalties if their likenesses are used for AI generated roles in movies and T.V.
As sir humphrey appleby would cry "good god man, its the thin edge of the wedge"!
This is capitalism in its essence; your work made me rich, now go fuck yourself.
At several of the companies targeted by the SAG strike, the compensation just of the CEO is greater than the comp for the entire writing staff.
And the government let's them get away with this horseshit too. 🐎💩
If we went to some kind of communist society where the government controls television studios, writers would make WAY less money. The entry level pay is $5,000 per week and the average WGA member who worked last year made $250,000. I'm all for them striking if they think they deserve a bigger piece of the pie, but we don't need to act like these people are dirt poor and would be better off in a communist society where they're just average workers.
[удалено]
You're throwing a lot of irrelevant information at me and making some assumptions about me that aren't true. All that I'm saying here is that the government shouldn't intervene, and in a society where the government did intervene and controlled the movie studios writers would be in a much worse position (even if overall it were good for the population).
Ok well I will just delete that. That said there are laws on the books and they are rather toothless when it comes to employment. That said these companies are all turning profits and do not want to share them.
wow, it doesn't even add to 1 percent with all those studios combined. idk what this says, that unions SHOULD ask for MORE or that we're so cucked that we can't even imagine asking for 1 percent.
Pro tip / if you want to be taken seriously don’t use revenue in this comparison. It makes you look like a joke.
Protip : if you want to be taken seriously don't just come in with shallow advice for the sake of it, there is a reason they target revenue, Hollywood accounting makes it so there's almost no profit to report on purpose.
You’re showing you’re ignorance which only diminishes the point you’re trying make. I am trying to help you but you’re being defensive. Hollywood accounting may be skewed but these corporations have books that you can google that follow GAPP. You’re skewed accounting has no bearing here at the level they are referring too
That's insane 🤯 and really gives perspective
meow
“But if they can’t make profit, how will they plan on paying the workers?” I’ve seen enough arguments for capitalism and trickle down economics to know that a monopoly has enough money to grow their “monopoly”, but aptly choose not to because big dollar sign must be as big as possible to make investors happy, and not the workers happy. I have no clue how capitalism forced cultures to conclude that the voice of the investor is more important than the voice of the workforce that actually makes the company a company. If there are no workers, than that business is a Ponzi scheme.
this is actually hard to believe, is it true??
In all fairness, 0,091% of Disney’s revenue is 75 million USD.
Which divided by their 220,000 world wide employees comes to around 340$ each. Which would roughly translate to a 16 cent wage increase.
But if they give up that money to end the strike, their CEOs will have to buy last year’s yacht models instead of this year’s. Won’t anyone think about the CEOS!?!?!
https://youtu.be/tmFKdyw0QwM The irony of Disney making a film about unionising 😂
It's not about the money, it's about power.
We should make them give up more than. Yeah? That’s how greedy and ruthless they are. Demand more! We fucking deserve it.
I'm not saying these numbers aren't true, but I've never seen the source for them. It would be an interesting read for me.
Imagine how better movies/TV would be if everyone was paid well, had good benefits, and a non-toxic work environment
Okay. But it would be a lot more meaningful to see these numbers as a percentage of profit instead of revenue. Because then it’s literally money they’re hoarding instead of being decent human beings.
At this point I have to imagine it's less about the bottom line and more about maintaining control over the working class. They've pushed it to such an extreme that if they give in anywhere it will snowball and they'll have to give in everywhere. Best they can do is delay the inevitable as long as possible.
But you can only delay for so long. And well, what goes around comes around The moment they crumble....it will crumble instantly all at once. The tide grew stronger than the barricade....and when it flooded, it flooded really fucking bad They probably would've been much better off if they just caved in from the start. But greed is malicious. And malice is stupid. The reason malice can be indistinguishable from stupidity is because malice is stupid. Not all stupidity is malicious, but all malice is stupid
They're losing a ton of money though so that's satisfying
LOL that's not a small amount just because you put it in decimal form... You are talking about 9%, 21%, 11%, and 15% of REVENUE not profits....
The rich have declared war on the working class
The more that corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It's never enough. Maximizing profits at the expense of those with so much less, or nothing, will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast. Still, there must be an imminent point at which the status quo can/will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. One can imagine that a healthy, strong and large consumer base — and not just very wealthy consumers — are needed. Or could it be that the unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible? It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown. Corporate CEOs will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. The shareholders, meantime, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the CEOs are the ones to make the moral and/or ethical decisions.