That is not at all what Hollywood guilds are like, though.
As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from
The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs.
That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.
There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.
The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.
Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?
Part of the guilds’ power is that they have rules and agreements with the other unions that disallow using non-union labor if other union labor is involved. Or if certain rules are broken. Bargaining is much more powerful when the actual product cannot be shipped if the unions strike or don’t work on your project. Software does not really have this restriction.
And as someone who also has many friends across various roles in the Industry (and once tried to break in), there is one not-oft talked about downside: it is rather difficult to get into the guilds, with a lot of unpaid internships and nepotism involved. And even with the great union contracts, hours are long, the work sometimes dirty, and the culture on set often times incredibly toxic.
So yes. The guild model probably the one that is more applicable to SWEs. But also don’t copy the model Hollywood has built too closely.
As someone who lives in LA, and is very close with people who work in the industry, the unions should be held up as a model for high skilled labor. It’s also something tech and (and especially the gaming industry) can learn from
The WGA, for example, allows the lowest-rung writers of tv shows to make $70-80k/year as a minimum floor for 6-8 months of work, twice that if it’s the full year, and guarantees you healthcare for when you’re unemployed between shows/gigs. That helps push up the wage ladder for everyone else, too— many established, but not famous, writers on regular shows that have decent size followings but are not phenomenons are able to earn $400/500k year base salaries this way, and provide a ladder to a really fortunate life for them and their families.
There’s many different guilds, from writing, to acting, to production, to lighting, to animation/vfx, to crew, to assistants, but they all more or less provide a baseline coverage to their members. IATSE, which is the guild that represents assistants and crew, went on strike last year and secured a minimum $25/hr wage and mandatory breaks last year.
The guilds explicitly foster creativity, because it allows even entry-level members to jump from company to company and project to project without worrying about day-to-day logistics.
Imagine if software engineers could hop from project to project at different companies working on just things they were interested in?