Limited Edition Foods

Please forgive me if I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming today to talk about an issue that is near and dear to my heart: that people should be paid for the work they do, especially when other people are profiting off of that work.

Being paid for work done is an issue I feel passionate about personally and one that I have written about professionally, as that link indicates (it cites to a law review article I wrote about payment issues in the construction industry). So I appreciate your bearing with me as I depart from talking about food for the day.

Which brings me to the writer’s strike that is currently taking place in Hollywood, or more accurately on sets across America. Please do not buy in to the misrepresentations of those who would have you believe that these writers are selfish elitists, marching for rich paydays at the expense of hardworking Americans who just want to come home after a long day of work and watch Lost.

In fact, the opposite is true. These are folks are simply trying to get paid for the work that they do. Period. And the studios are expecting them to work for free. It’s that simple.

Right now the writer’s are caught in a bizarre contractual loophole that states that everything that ends up on the internet is a mere “promo.” This means Writer’s Guild of America members are currently not being paid for anything that ends up on the Internet … even while ads are sold around those episodes (an advertisement in the middle of a “promo” - how strange), even while studios are building business models around the recognition that more and more people are watching television on the internet, even while everyone recognizes that it will be the portable internet and not the heavy and unportable television that delivers our entertainment in the decades to come.

As one writer put it, they are not marching for more rights … they are really just trying to maintain the status quo and the basic concept that an honest day’s work leads to an honest day’s pay. Don’t believe the hype that this is about greed, folks. We are talking about simple compensation for work well done, and companies trying to profit off of that work without paying for it.

To understand a bit more about the issues, take four minutes and watch the very well done You Tube video “Why We Fight” which explains the issues much better than I can. Or watch the very funny clip of the writers from The Office below, which explains the bizarre conundrum of studios labeling an entire episode of a show “a promo.”