Leave it to Bernie Sanders to sum it up best. “Last year, 8 Hollywood CEOs made nearly $800 million, yet pay for TV writers has fallen by 23 percent over the last 10 years.” Ouch. That’s a concise description of the reason more than 11,000 writers are now on strike. And in America? That’s a big deal, because the Writers’ Guild is one of the few labour organizations which still functions. You don’t see a strike at this scale often, even in Europe — but especially not in America.
All of this is a perfect metaphor for where our economies are. What went wrong with them. Why they feel so…hopelessly broken. Let me begin at the beginning.
Think about what it means to have your income fall by 25% or so over a decade. Your income should grow. Over time. As you gain experience, as you gain skills, as you learn how to be more “productive,” and I’ll come back to that. But we all know — at least those of us who aren’t billionaires — that…that doesn’t really happen anymore.
What does happen? Well, what happens is exemplified by the flipside of the writers on strike — Big Tech. The dawn of streaming brought with it huge monopolies. Those huge monopolies pay…pennies…to artists, writers, musicians. This is a huge issue in music, too, where even the world’s top artists, LOL, can’t make a living off what they stream, because the monopolies have set the rates that low. Meanwhile? From Spotify to YouTube, they’re making a killing.