Hitting the Strike

Puns like these should be properly compensated

This week, my union, the Writers Guild of America, went on strike.

For me, practically, this has meant little change in my day-to-day life, which has been a hazy cycle of self-directed work or procrastination, because I haven’t been able to find a job writing television. During these past two years, I’ve had a lot of time to think, and those thoughts mostly tell me that if I were more talented, had a better personality, or sent better emails, then I would be rewarded with a job. I wouldn’t have spent so many days inventing errands to break up the monotony of watching my savings account dwindle as the sun slowly set over the mountains. That savings account, thankfully, was bolstered by my last job, which was the type that is rapidly disappearing from this industry.

That job also allowed me to keep my union health insurance coverage through the birth of my daughter, which is lucky, because before insurance our hospital bill was about $40,000. I have subsequently lost that insurance, which would have cost over $3,000 a month through Cobra to keep. So now I have much worse insurance for the much better (lol) price of $1,500 a month. For some reason having employer-sponsored health insurance has been the marker of successful employment in my adult life (probably because…I dunno…an adult should have health insurance?) and losing it was a good amount of what I talked about in therapy last year. In a fun twist (God IS a writer!) I can no longer afford my therapist under my new insurance.

In the past two years I’ve written two new television pilots, three television treatments, a feature (which went through about fifteen drafts), a feature treatment, a feature outline, three short films, and this newsletter. I’ve had about ten billion meetings with corporations regarding these projects. I’ve sent a lot of humiliating emails and text messages to friends desperately chasing job leads. I’ve also been filming a stop-motion animation in my closet featuring Barbie dolls for longer than I’d like to admit, a project which increasingly feels like a evidence of a particular type of mental illness (if only I had a therapist to tell me which type!). None of these things, it may shock you to hear, have resulted in actual, human money.

This strike has felt energizing. Mostly because I have somewhere to go every day—as it turns out, a lot of people who aren’t working actually would like to work! I’ve been walking picket lines where I can have conversations with colleagues who have also had a hard time, who have also felt like it’s just them. It’s made me feel a little bit better, like maybe the reason I haven’t been working has more to do with the system than my bad personality! Because when you think about it, a lot of people with bad personalities do just fine.

It’s gross when writers describe the work they do as important. There’s not a lot of work that’s really that important (scientists and doctors, we’re looking at you!) but it is work, and work should be compensated. And so for that reason, all this week, I’ve been going to the lot at Universal and marching back and forth under the watchful eye of the horrifying Universal Studios minion (a product of some writer’s cursed brain) to elucidate that theory to the studio heads who aren’t quite sold on it yet.

Hopefully they come around soon, but as any writer knows, they’ll have to go on a bit of a journey to transform themselves and come back changed. And we’ll be here when they do, because if there’s one thing writers are really good at it’s loudly complaining and waiting for their checks!