The Writers’ Strike & Negotiating Your Dream Job (feat. one of John Oliver's Writers)

Taylor Kay Phillips: They called me and I was in a coffee shop and they said, “Do you wanna write for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver?” And I mean, it was the biggest moment of my life. It was everything that I had been working for, and because of the union, because what other people had negotiated for me, because there were other people, there were other 30-year-old women outside at, you know, 6:00am walking around trying to shut down some type of show that I could just say yes. Because I knew what the negotiations had resulted in, and I knew what my salary was going to be and that I could afford to live. I knew that I was gonna get insurance with one cycle. I knew that so much of this had been negotiated for me, and there are so many people that want the job that I have, and there are so many people who are qualified for the job that I have. And because of the union, it doesn't turn into “Who will do it for $5 an hour? Who will do it for exposure? How can we get you to the lowest level?” 

Katie: Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Girls and Boys. I'm your host, Katie Gatti Tassin. And today we are covering the Hollywood writers’ strike. Now, normally we don't really cover current events, but a listener reached out who writes for John Oliver, and we started talking about the strike, and it occurred to me that there are broader implications for other people who do creative work or who find themselves in a negotiating position for their dream job. So a little background on what's going down before we get into the conversation with Taylor. 

The Writers Guild of America, or WGA, is a union of more than 11,000 writers for television shows and film, and they're currently on strike because they failed to negotiate a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It's effectively being treated like the strike for fair pay in the streaming era, because if you adjust for inflation, the average writer's salary has decreased by 20% over the last decade. So it's a job in which it's increasingly difficult to find stability. That said, streaming is currently a bit of a money-losing chapter in television history. Companies like Netflix, HBO, Disney, they're dumping a ton of cash into streaming services that are not profitable. So it's not a great backdrop for a strike. Shows made for streamers typically have fewer episodes per season, but still require the same amount of work. And the writers are paid more up front, but less over time, since there's no syndication royalties gravy train anymore. In the before times, your main goal as a writer in Hollywood was to get a gig writing for a broadcast television show, because it was stable and had more upside success, and syndication would mean residual income for a long time to come. And the last writer's strike was in 2007. It lasted for a hundred days and it cost the California economy an estimated $2.1 billion, which goes to show how valuable the labor in question really is. There are some other big downstream impacts too, when you consider how many related industries also shutter when production shuts down.

NBC, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers are all extending staff pay as of May 3. And today, because of the nature of how these shows are filmed, some of the first shows to go off the air are the late-night talk shows, because they're filmed in close to real time. We'll be right back after a message from the sponsors of today's episode. 

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Katie: So our guest today is a listener of the show and a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her husband is a writer for Stephen Colbert. So they both have relatively stable, full-time work as Hollywood writers. Taylor, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: Thank you so much for having me. I am truly fangirling, but trying to be cool about it. 

Katie: The pleasure is truly all mine. So I actually wanna start with a personal finance question, if that's okay? 

Taylor Kay Phillips: Sure. 

Katie: So you're a writer for John Oliver; your husband writes for Colbert. These are relatively stable writing gigs, I've learned, in the entertainment industry, because they're essentially full-time, yes? 

Taylor Kay Phillips: Yes, for the most part. 

Katie: How is your financial position different from the average full-time worker? What types of contingencies do you two need to have in place that the average full-time worker might not? 

Taylor Kay Phillips: So the thing about late-night TV is that they are incredibly stable jobs in the television industry, and unstable compared with the way most people think about career trajectories. They are stable in the way that these shows run, basically, the whole year. Colbert is 52 weeks and John Oliver is about 44 paid weeks. So a season is a year, whereas with a season of any other show that's maybe now in the current landscape, you know, eight to 10 episodes, however many weeks. So they're also “stable” from a financial planning standpoint. So thanks to previous Writers Guild negotiations, we are guaranteed 13-week cycles. So every 13 weeks I get a letter that says they are exercising their option, and I get 13 more weeks of work. So that's 13 more weeks of income guaranteed. Which is a weird double-edged sword. Because most people don't think of their employment in 13-week chunks, and they don't think every 13 weeks, “Am I gonna get fired or not?” But also, they could get fired any day, most people in the US, which is something you don't think about, like at will. So in that case it's more stable but also less stable. 

And the other way that these jobs are incredibly unstable is this isn't a company; I don't work for a company, I work for a show. The show is funded by a network and hosted by one guy, and a wonderful guy. And my husband's show is the same way. So it's the Seth Meyers show, it's the John Oliver show, it's the whatever. And as soon as that guy who, again, they're wonderful, wonderful, talented men, but as soon as they wanna go do something else, which is totally their right, we're done. You know, I don't move somewhere else within the company. I don't take a different position or…it's over, my job is over. And so what that means for us as a family, my husband and I, is that we have to be ready to go for really long stretches without work. That when we're doing financial planning, it is not a linear exercise. I'm not gonna be writing for John Oliver when I'm 50, because he's gonna be like 65 and hopefully resting instead of, you know, cracking jokes about prison mold or poison clouds or whatever thing that I wish I were making jokes about today instead of being on strike.

So we have a pension within our guild, but that doesn't vest until we've made enough money over five years. So what we have is we have an S-Corp that we're trying to build a retirement portfolio within, and we are writers, so we have some things that we can expense that a lot of other people can't. You know, our subscriptions are necessary to do our job. A lot of books are necessary to do our job. I have an office space. So there are things that we can do from a personal finance standpoint because our life is so much of our work, but we have to have so much cash on hand for events like this, for spaces that we're not working, and that's money that we're not using to build wealth.

And we're also at entry-level jobs in our careers. We are both at our first television writing jobs, and very likely in the current state of affairs, they are the most secure jobs we are ever going to have in a lifetime of…in this industry. We want this to be a conversation that's far off, but if we wanted to have a baby, we should do it right now. That's our personal finance journey, is how much finance advice, how much Money with Katie can I take in and say, okay, yes, this applies to me, but how much doesn't, because I'm not on a linear path, I'm not going for promotion in that way. I'm not, I can't anticipate that when I'm 45 I'll be making 30% more than I'm making now.

Katie: Right. So how much do you make as writers, and who gets a cut of that? Because I imagine there are representatives or agents or other people that get a piece of the pie that other, I'll say normal job or average job, might not think about when it comes to your compensation, if you don't have an agent or a rep that is necessary to do your job. So I'm curious if you can speak a little bit about that. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: We're paid in these 13-week cycles and the guild has negotiated cycles for other people in scripted. We're paid a weekly minimum that was negotiated for us by the guild in times past. In scripted shows, they often get that weekly fee to be in the writers’ room. And then if you get your name on the script, there's a fee associated with that. Those weekly rates are pretty high. They're like $4,800 a week. 

Katie: Wow. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: But for most writers, 10% to 25% of that goes to agents, managers, and lawyers. 

Katie: Wow. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: If you have an agent and a manager, they're probably each taking about 10%. If any of you are aspiring writers out there, 15% is too high; ask more questions, and no one should be asking for money from you to represent you. That's a scam. And then lawyers to negotiate your contract. So that's very possibly a quarter of that. 1.5% of it goes to union dues. Take all my money, especially right now. Absolutely. And then taxes come out.

And the other thing, of course, to remember is that many, many writers are not making that rate 52 weeks a year. So those numbers are a lot if you annualize them. But on a broader level, that's not what's happening. Again, it used to be 21, 22 episode seasons for TV shows. You could write for one TV show, you make your year, you get your residuals, which is this whole other thing of when the show comes on. But now it's just that flat number. 

And to throw in my own personal comedy variety strike fact, right now, that minimum number does not apply to writers who are writing comedy variety shows on streaming services only. So if David Zaslav decided tomorrow, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is on HBO Max only, or I'm sorry, it's Max now. They took away the HBO. If Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, it's Max only, they could pay me whatever they wanted. 

Katie: So there's a bit of a, I'll say hack in the system on their end. Okay, that's really interesting. So I'm curious how someone even gets a job like this. What does the aspiring writer to actual writer pipeline look like? Can you tell us how you got your job? 

Taylor Kay Phillips: So the aspiring writer to actual writer pipeline is so much like free work and side hustle. It's a consistent side hustle until it's not. Honestly, it's a lot like what you've talked about in building Money with Katie and what a lot of people talk about in building businesses, except for it's to get into a different career field.

So my entire time in the workforce since graduating college, I have never had one job at a time, ever. And for so, so many writers and they all have their own stories, but it starts with writing and trying to break into writing being separate from what your day job is and how you pay your rent. So for me, I worked in advertising for years, writing comedy on the side for short-form publications. I was a copywriter; I tried to be a tutor. And then so you're doing all this writing, trying to hone your craft, of course, but also trying to meet other people who are doing the same thing. I spent thousands of dollars in improv and sketch classes trying to learn the comedy.

And then what happens…you know, you can't just go onto Indeed or Glassdoor and say, please, to write comedy, send your resume off. The act of applying for a comedy writing job in late night is to do something called a “packet,” which is somehow you find out that places are looking, which used to be only through agents and managers, and now can sometimes be through friends or through knowing people, or through people knowing you, thinking that you might be interested. And then you do…in a lot of cases, some people do pay for packets, but in a lot of cases you do free work. You write a sample episode of the show, you write monologue jokes while you're doing whatever full-time job is paying your rent. You're doing, in your off hours, what hopefully you want to be doing in your permanent hours.

And for a lot of people in scripted, there is a path that starts with being someone's assistant and you learn the industry and there's a hierarchy of assistantships that I can't speak to as much, but you know, you're someone's assistant and then you're maybe an assistant in the writers’ room. But that does not lead to a writing job because someone says, “Would you like to be a writer now?” It leads to a writer job because while you are doing all of those assistant jobs, you are writing scripts or you are pitching jokes or doing samples. So the buy-in to a career like this, the advance, like the student loans of time, basically. If I went hourly, the amount of time I've spent writing comedy, I might be at $3.50 an hour at this point.

Katie: And that's what's so interesting, because you liken it to what I've done and I see that parallel. But I would say that in this instance, the key ingredient, though, that's missing on the writer's side is that for me, all of the unpaid work that went into building a business, I got to capture all the upside of that because when it took off, there you go. But it doesn't sound like that's actually the case once you get into writing. You have your minimums, right, but you don't have this kind of unlimited benefit to be gained. So I wanted to ask you about this specifically, because you've already referenced residuals and syndication.

So now that we're in the streaming era, let's say I watch Euphoria season one 15 times…totally hypothetical, I definitely have not watched it 15 times. But do the people who wrote season one of Euphoria or even the actors on the show, do they get a cut of me watching it 15 times? Does that benefit them at all if a show is a hit? 

Taylor Kay Phillips: So I technically cannot speak to Euphoria specifically because I don't know. But there's nothing right now in the agreement made for writers that would give the writers a cut in any way. There is nothing that says, and this is what is bananas to me. There's nothing that says that we even have a right to know how many people watch Euphoria. I, as a writer for John Oliver, appreciate all the people who watch Euphoria and don't turn it off, and then we get the viewer numbers for our show, which it's something that John has said before, which is very funny and I love it. But no, right now there is nothing that equates the success of a show on streaming, or that turns the success of a show on streaming into profit for the writers who made it. And there is also nothing that codifies what constitutes the success of a show. 

Katie: That's so odd. So as the creative storyteller who is really putting in the work, it doesn't sound like you're actually capturing much of the upside. So who does benefit if a streamer is a raging success?

Taylor Kay Phillips: Right now, it is the studios; it is the networks. And it is a really difficult thing to speak to directly, because we don't have a lot of this information. We know the numbers that the guild has put out that I don't have right in front of me, which I should have, which is that they're claiming that streaming is about to be very profitable. A lot of them have already claimed profit. The other weird thing that's happening is that writers aren't seeing any profits from, is that these streamers are using our work to sell their product in international markets, and the writers of network TV, too. If I'm over in France and I'm saying “Buy Netflix, subscribe to Netflix, we are airing The Office,” that's marketing material. There's no benefit to writing on a hit show. It used to be that a hit show meant you got a lot of seasons, meant you went into syndication, meant the show was playing over and over again on TV, meant you kept getting money in your pocket. 

Katie: You could be set for life in certain cases. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: 100%. 

Katie: We'll be right back after a message from the sponsors of today's episode.

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Katie: So I'm a big fan of Succession. I've seen some really funny picket signs that are like, “Pay us more or we will spoil Succession.” And I was like, these signs, they played themselves by giving writers a bunch of free time to make hilarious picket signs, and I'm living for it. But I do wanna ask you what role the union plays in this movement. What is the most important element for success? Because with all the facts you've laid out, it sounds like it's a pretty integral part to making sure that the value of what you're doing is compensated fairly.

Taylor Kay Phillips: The union is everything. This is a small personal element. And then I'll talk more broadly. They called me and I was in a coffee shop and they said, “Do you wanna write for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver?” And I mean, it was the biggest moment of my life. It was everything that I had been working for, and because of the union, because what other people had negotiated for me, because there were other people, there were other 30-year-old women outside at, you know, 6:00am walking around trying to shut down some type of show that I could just say yes. Because I knew what the negotiations had resulted in, and I knew what my salary was going to be and that I could afford to live. I knew that I was gonna get insurance with one cycle. I knew that so much of this had been negotiated for me, and there are so many people that want the job that I have, and there are so many people who are qualified for the job that I have. And because of the union, it doesn't turn into “Who will do it for $5 an hour? Who will do it for exposure? How can we get you to the lowest level?” 

And I'm a white woman, but for people of color, for marginalized folks, for disabled folks who are trying to break into this really, really difficult industry to be able to say, “Okay, once I get there, I'm going to be taken care of” is huge and makes the shows that we wanna make, and the union did that. Because I wanna believe that I would've been strong, but I wouldn't have been strong. 

Katie: You're like, “I'll do it for free.” 

Taylor Kay Phillips: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So that's what the union has done for me, besides give me absolutely amazing health insurance that I desperately need. But the union right now and the strength of our solidarity and the solidarity of other unions with us is literally the reason we are able to fight for these conditions at all. Because there's such a high supply of people who wanna be doing this work: writing TV, making movies. And we are so lucky to be able to do what we do. But we are not just lucky, we are also skilled and talented, and these studios are lucky to have us. And we've gotten to where we are today and the gains we've made over the years, because we are strong enough and together enough to realize that this work does not exist without us. And to stand together and say, “We will prove that if you force us to.” And 97.85% of writers in this guild voted to authorize to give our council and our negotiating committee the right to authorize a strike, to call a strike in the negotiations, because we knew that what we were fighting for was, and this word's been used so much, but it is existential.

And so where we're at right now is saying, we are not gonna blink first when it comes to making this work, because we are the ones who actually make it. Where the solidarity comes in is that yes, we are the ones who write the shows, but a whole lot of other people make TV, and a whole lot of those people are unionized, and they saw what the studios have done. And this is going to sound incredibly naive—this is up there with “unions are everything,” and I own that, but people use the term “labor organizing” and they're not kidding. These people are so organized. It is “Where can we be picketing so that we stall productions so that we make it clear to the studios that work does not get done if we aren't willing to do it.”

But the biggest part of that is that IATSE, which is the crew, and the Teamsters union, and SAG, and so many other unions, are refusing to cross our picket lines, and our organizing goes so far when a picket line means something, because then what our organizers are thinking is “Where do we put the picket line? How do we make it the most effective? And how do we bring people water and get 'em pizza and how do people help?” 

But those picket lines are only as strong as the people who won't cross them. But because IATSE and the Teamsters and these other folks would not cross the picket line, the role the union is playing and the most important element to success is for what we are saying to be true, which is, this does not get made without us. And the bigger and the bolder that that “us” can be, the more true it's gonna ring for the studios, and the more it's gonna hurt them the only place that they know how to hurt, which is in their frickin’ growth, shareholder, whatever for Wall Street. Because we've decided to make a growth-first model on creativity, which is its own bonkers thing. We could do a whole other episode about the efficiency of creativity. 

Katie: Well, there was a very amazing…I was in preparation for this, and in talking with you and just the background that you gave me before we sat down for our conversation today, I was doing a lot of reading and I wanted to see how people are responding, people that are not in the entertainment industry. And I saw a comment online that I thought was really powerful, and this person basically said, “I would rather live in a world that values stories and storytellers than one that values, effectively, CEOs and businesspeople.” And I think that the solidarity that you're highlighting and the dynamics at play here, you're right, it really only works if everyone is unified in their agreement that you don't have a product without us. Eventually something has to give, because as long as we are not going to work, we have all these other people that are standing with us that are on our side and agree and ultimately want the same fair wages and benefits and wanna be able to benefit from the value that you're creating for that studio or marketplace.

Taylor Kay Phillips: Yes, 100%. Now, the voices of other folks behind them saying, “Do you guys remember last time?” So much of what we are showing these people is that we're not messing around. First of all, you can't make this go away by trying to outlast us, because you've basically created an army of people who know how to go a long time without being paid. I don't know what you think you're doing. 

Katie: You’re like, “I have a huge emergency fund and I am prepared to use it.” Taylor, thank you so much for joining us today. I really cannot tell you how much I appreciate it, especially on such short notice, and after you've been up early doing your thing out there on the picket lines. So we really appreciate you joining us today and sharing your experience. 

Taylor Kay Phillips: Thank you so, so much for having me. It is truly a big life highlight and milestone. 

Katie: Me too. I think that the broader implications here are also really interesting, because in looking at this movement from a bystander’s perspective, it looks a lot like the gig economy unification of a formerly stable industry, where one could, if they reached a certain level of success, create a solid middle-class life for themselves. And I think you see this dynamic in basically all fields where it's considered a highly sought-after job. It's expected that you'll work for peanuts or no pay at all, because there's a sense that you should just be happy to be there. And having a union in these types of industries can help codify what the labor is actually worth. There's a similar relationship for actors on streamers, too, who aren't in executive producer roles. To extend our Euphoria example from earlier, Zendaya, the actress who plays the main character in the show, will reportedly earn $1 million per episode for season three. Now, Zendaya is an Emmy award-winning actress. She just closed this huge renegotiation; she can command these much higher rates.

But the also very famous supporting actress on the show, Sidney Sweeney, was paid around $25,000 per episode in season two. Of course, Euphoria did give her the exposure to go get more work and earn more elsewhere, but the drop-off in pay is pretty steep. 

Nonetheless, despite the success of the show, much like the writers, the actors and actresses involved don't directly benefit from a show being a huge hit in the same way that actors from the previous cable era still do to this day, when their reruns air. And as Taylor highlighted, these rates are kind of just the beginning, because when you have managers and agents and representatives, they all get a cut of the pie.

So let's talk about negotiation, especially when you are in an environment where you're talking about something that is a dream job. Because in industries where unionization is common, that obviously plays a large role in the type of compensation you can command, which is why organized labor is so important. But in industries where it's uncommon or you are talking about smaller business deals as an entrepreneur, there are a few negotiation tactics I've learned over the last few years that I wanted to highlight, because I am not a negotiation expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been in a surprising number of “unique,” we'll say, situations over the last few years with people who are a lot more seasoned than I am, which has taught me a few things.

The first is actually highlighted quite well by the Zendaya example, and that's that a track record is leverage. In her case, she has other highly visible work like Spider-Man and Dune, two franchises I know approximately nothing about. And she has Emmys. And while most of us probably are not gracing the step-and-repeats at award shows anytime soon, I was able to use my track record of building a successful business on my own as a bargaining chip in my 2021 negotiations for the acquisition of the Money with Katie franchise. When you go into a negotiation with the numbers to back up your position, like “I grew this business by x percent in 12 months, or I reduced costs by x percent month over month, et cetera,” it quantifies the value of your skill set, and the more visible that track record is, the better.

The second is a tactic that I learned recently called “your number, my terms.” If you are negotiating with someone in a situation where the number, for whatever reason, is not as malleable, this tactic can still recoup some control for you. So you say, “I'll do X, Y, Z for your number, but we're gonna do it on my terms.” And the terms you ask for will vary depending on the nature of the work, but if the up-front monetary amount isn't all that favorable and you wanna take the opportunity anyway, exercising more control over how the work gets done or what upsides you're going to get later is important. So your upside basically means, how do you benefit from this if it goes well? Usually it's structured like a straightforward percentage.

For example, maybe you get 20% of revenue. And much like part of the writers’ grievances are that streaming has effectively obliterated the upside of their work's potential, making sure you are going to benefit from something’s success means you'll be incentivized to make it succeed, which usually works better for both parties. 

And number three, on that note, I have learned that there are creative ways to structure negotiations when high-value projects are at stake, but each player's contributions will be different. So a tiered model, especially one with a price floor, can ensure that your floor amount never drops below a certain point. For example, say you're negotiating with a partner for a new venture for which you are both going to provide something that the other needs to make it successful. You can structure a deal such that the payout amounts are contingent upon different outcomes. So for example, maybe we're partnering, you and I, to create a copywriting agency, and I'm gonna be the operational leader and you're gonna be the business development driver. So maybe I negotiate that if our annual revenue is $250k or less, we split it 70/30 me, with a $70,000 floor for me, because at that number, my operational involvement does not make sense for anything less. But since I'm relying on you for referrals and those will have a major impact on long-term growth and how much new business we're getting and how large we can scale, I want you to be incentivized to drive a ton of new business.

So maybe we decide that if the total outcome is more than $500k, we now split it 50/50 and anything between $250k and $500k is a 60/40. So the more revenue we make, the higher your split goes, because the new business will be mostly driven by you. That, of course, is just an example, but it does go to show that you can get creative in the way that you structure compensation, such that it incentivizes both parties to do their job well. 

All right, y'all, that is all for this week. I will see you next week, same time, same place, on The Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.