When Writers Strike
One thing we all learned from this weekend's New York Times is that when writers go on strike they still feel the need to write stuff, which means that the Sunday paper was filled with I'm-A-Starving-TV-Writer essays. I have mixed feelings about this strike. On the one hand, as a writer, I want the best for other writers. On the other hand, these are not coal miners who are being denied health care by the mining company, or people who are risking their lives daily to provide us with ...coal?... or grumpy northern English steelworkers who are watching their towns suffer at the hands of corporations while their youngest sons go to London to become ballerinas.
Instead, we've got pictures of Seth Myers and Tina Fey walking around in front of the NBC building, which only reminds us that, hey, those people work at the NBC building, one of the nicest buildings in New York, where you have to pass through maximum security just to get into the elevators, and when they're done with their insanely highly paid day jobs they probably just pop over to Bergdorfs to pick up a new cashmere scarf and patent leather gloves so they're not cold the next day on the picket line.
The fact is that when you decide to become a writer you pretty much agree to receive payment in non-monetary ways. Like looking lovingly at your article in a magazine, for which your hourly wage probably comes to something like -23 cents, or smiling at your book as you pass it in Barnes and Noble, the advance for which you spent long before the book even came out. I'm not saying this is right, and certainly writers deserve to be as ridiculously rich as producers or actors or those guys who design the opening credits or whatever else TV people do that makes them zillions of dollars. I'm just saying that it's hard to have sympathy for people who have jobs that most people would do for free, and also for which I would be a willing and able scab. In case anyone at the Daily Show wants to hire a few scab writers. I could totally do that job. I swear.
Instead, we've got pictures of Seth Myers and Tina Fey walking around in front of the NBC building, which only reminds us that, hey, those people work at the NBC building, one of the nicest buildings in New York, where you have to pass through maximum security just to get into the elevators, and when they're done with their insanely highly paid day jobs they probably just pop over to Bergdorfs to pick up a new cashmere scarf and patent leather gloves so they're not cold the next day on the picket line.
The fact is that when you decide to become a writer you pretty much agree to receive payment in non-monetary ways. Like looking lovingly at your article in a magazine, for which your hourly wage probably comes to something like -23 cents, or smiling at your book as you pass it in Barnes and Noble, the advance for which you spent long before the book even came out. I'm not saying this is right, and certainly writers deserve to be as ridiculously rich as producers or actors or those guys who design the opening credits or whatever else TV people do that makes them zillions of dollars. I'm just saying that it's hard to have sympathy for people who have jobs that most people would do for free, and also for which I would be a willing and able scab. In case anyone at the Daily Show wants to hire a few scab writers. I could totally do that job. I swear.
posted by Hana @ 12:18 PM
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