If TV seems bad lately, wait until you see what next year has to offer. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) took to the picket lines on May 2 and has been out for three weeks. With studios standing firm and firing off inflammatory and possibly illegal provocations, the strike — the first by screenwriters in fifteen years, when the WGA walked out for over a month — shows no sign of ending soon. And while writing jobs are often denigrated as soft and frivolous by reactionaries (echoing the rhetoric of bosses), the current strike serves as a reminder that Hollywood has always been part of the broader push and pull between labor and capital.

Many issues are at play in the strike, most of them concerning automation. Almost all of the guild’s twenty thousand members are facing severe reductions in their income as studios reclassify streaming media as a sort of protected category, resulting in writers receiving a tiny percentage of what they once made from residuals. Additionally, buying the tech hype of the moment, some studios — very likely being sold a bill of goods by equally profit-hungry bosses in a different industry — believe that they can cut writers out of the equation by replacing them with artificial intelligence.

If the ownership class in Hollywood thinks that it can crush the writers’ strike and go on with business as usual, pausing only to teach ChatGPT how to write a convincing episode of prestige television, it’s likely in for a rude awakening. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the union that represents film and television actors, is already picketing in solidarity with the WGA, and its national executive director has urged members to vote to authorize a strike. Meanwhile, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) is itself engaged in contract negotiations with the studios, and the revenue-stripping from streaming is a common thread between all three unions. If directors, writers, and actors all struck together — a big if, to be fair — executives might have to start tap dancing on street corners to pay their mortgages.