On Sept. 27, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) ended their nearly five month long strike. The strike began May 2 due to labor disputes with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), a grouping of major film studios designed to combine company interests during labor negotiations. 

   Production on many shows and movies restarted once the deal was made, with Late-Night shows including the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Falon and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returning that same week. Fallon remarked on the situation at the beginning of his first show back when he joked that, “The studio was empty for so long, NBC converted it to a Spirit Halloween.”

   Scripted shows and movies will be slower to come back, especially since actors are still on strike. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) began striking shortly after the WGA and are still waiting to make a deal with the AMPTP. Leaders of the actors’ strike say they have a newfound optimism since a deal was successfully made with the writers.

    A tentative agreement was made between the WGA and the AMPTP on Sept. 25 and appears to give the writers a lot of what they wanted. The deal includes an 18 percent  increase in initial pay,  a 26 percent increase in residual payments, and accelerated payment on content for subscription based video services. This combined with increased bonuses based on foreign subscriber count and viewership have greatly increased the compensation writers receive for the content they provide to rapidly growing streaming services, the number one concern of the writers strike. Writers for TV and ad based services also received increased pay rates. 

   Part of what both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA were striving for was limits to the use of AI in order to ensure they were not replaced. This has been a widely debated issue for many in creative fields, and the agreement between the WGA and the AMPTP has become one of the first deals to set a precedent for this issue. Under the minimum basic agreement (MBA), AI-generated material cannot be considered literary material, source material, or assigned material. The guild can also assert that the use of a writer’s material to train AI is prohibited by the MBA.

   The success of the writers’ strike has inspired workers in many other fields to begin striking after proving that big companies can be forced into paying fair wages. Actors continue to strike and negotiations have now begun to receive similar benefits from the videogame industry.