A Writers’ Strike in the Age of Adjuncts

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One day in week five of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, I tagged along with a friend and headed out to picket Gate 11 of the Warner Bros. ranch. It was late May and not yet hot in LA. But you could tell how hot July and August would get. 

I live in Cleveland so I was just a strike tourist. But I wanted to pitch in. I wanted to drag my own labor frustrations across the country and give myself something useful to do. 

My friend is a TV writer and a strike captain in WGA West. The WGA’s strike started in early May, to refuse recent contract terms asked by the big corporate studios—they negotiate together as the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers)—and to protest how writers’ jobs and pay have been degraded and diminished in recent years. 

Why Gate 11? I didn’t know but I learned: because of the Teamsters, who are standing in solidarity with the WGA. Lindsay Dougherty, head of the Teamsters’ Local 399 in LA, has memorably put it: “What I’d like to say to the studios is: If you want to fuck around, you’re gonna find out.” Generally, Teamsters can’t be fired for refusing to cross a picket line, so if a picket line blocks the entrances to a production studio, it blocks trucks driven by the Teamsters, effectively slowing production. So this is among the tasks of the WGA, day by day, gate by gate.

My first lesson: picket lines are material, not symbolic. Old millennials like me have participated in countless protests—thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people flooding downtown, with all our signs and chants and fury. A protest makes a big statement, feels necessary, disrupts the city for a day or a while, but rarely seems to disrupt war-making, police brutality, business as usual. I’ve participated in some of the biggest protests in human history and we’ve achieved few or none of our goals. The picket line is a material obstacle to production and to the corporate income stream. I knew this from watching movies on strikes (e.g. Barbara Kopple’s documentary Harlan County, USA and its devastating counterpart American Dream) but somehow I didn’t know it. Only about ten percent of US workers belong to a union. I’ve been in the workforce for 26 years and have only been in a union for 2. Perhaps in our consciousness, strikes remain more symbolic—a dream, an uplifting story—than material. After all, I first learned about strikes when I was 11 and my grandmother took me to see Newsies. Christian Bale, memorably, rides a horse without a horse.   

Have you ever crossed a crosswalk for four and a half hours? Eventually you’re making a kind of sick eye contact with the traffic light’s merciless little white walking man. In the first couple hours, you chit-chat and meet the small crew around you. You pause to eat donated snacks, get the chip dust off your fingers. In the last hour, people talk less. They loop and loop. Normally your work may be more like: a laptop, a Zoom room, a document you’re typing in. Now it’s a small continuous loop you’re walking, and the sign or fist you raise at passing cars, who honk and honk. If this strike were on any ballot, it would win: the city is for it. The city keeps honking. You almost stop hearing the noise, though usually I am motivated by this kind of feedback. Heading into the strike, I was nervous about what clever slogan I’d write on my sign (the top half of the standard sign proclaims the strike, the bottom half is left blank for handwriting). But don’t worry, the signs are prewritten by previous strikers, and you just pick one from a stack. On my two days of picketing, I went with one that said “Are you not entertained?” (Gladiator) and one that said something like “This strike’s inciting incidents are derivative.”

Most picketers are WGA members, but some, like me, are not. They may be in SAG-AFTRA (actors), or IATSE (crew), or they may be aspiring writers who hope to join the WGA. I’m in the AAUP (professors). On social media, the WGA strike looks like a party. Famous actors, directors, and writers/showrunners show up and record little videos. Successful folks kindly buy food trucks for the day. Weezer and Imagine Dragons show up to play (hmm). The party energy is strong PR and helps buoy people through a strike’s starkest truth: if this is your industry, you may be without income for weeks then months—an effect radiating throughout the city and its workers, as production dwindles. TV writers are employed show by show, which means they’re used to gaps in pay, sure—but for many, they don’t know when they’ll next get work, on what, or for how long, even after the strike ends. Energized, fired up, righteous, and/or tired, scared, and precarious. Waves of emotion and dull time. For hours, you participate in an ancient repetitive task, walking the line. While I was there, the AMPTP wasn’t even in negotiations with the WGA; they were negotiating with the actors’ and directors’ unions. So there was little hope of a near resolution. The 2007–2008 WGA strike lasted 100 days.

Solidarity is a reason I was there. Another is jealousy. I work in higher ed. I miss the sense of collectivity, the dream of collective action, that the higher ed workforce badly needs and mostly lacks. I miss something I mostly know through imagining it. Can you imagine something, through the pain of its absence, into existence? 

It felt right to bring questions like this—about the relationship between the imaginary and the material—to LA, city of the dream factories, and its labor actions. I’m a literary writer and editor and I teach in an English literature department. My main sources of income, the central pillars of my job, are teaching and editing, not writing. Very few literary writers in the US—novelists, essayists, poets—make enough from their writing to live on. (And if they do, it’s often through well-paying speaking gigs, grants, and other ways to supplement book income.) TV and film writers are pretty much the only creative writers whose writing is a full-time job. This means the field they work in is more commercial. It also means their work is valued enough that they can strike.

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What does higher ed labor look like, in the collective imaginary? Something like Dead Poets Society? “O captain! My captain!” That’s about a prep school not a college, but it’s got the right elite vibe. Students stand on their desks to praise you, Robin Williams, the genius teacher, against the bourgeois corruption of the institution. You get fired, but history will redeem you. This pernicious ideal of the iconoclastic outsider—the teacher/scholar as maverick too brilliant to belong—has, I think, damaged higher ed as a workplace and weakened foundations for solidarity in the profession. A problem with the imagination. Though the destruction of higher ed has also been profoundly, systematically material: decades of cuts to state funding, corporatization and administrative bloat, and above all the shattering of the teaching profession until nearly half of the workforce is part-time low-wage gig labor. In higher ed these part-time teachers are known as “adjuncts” (they often work full-time hours, or much more—they’re just on part-time contracts so they can’t get benefits). Adjunctification has disappeared thousands of middle-class jobs and dismantled the promise of the tenure track, its vision of work in the humanities on behalf of society. 

In Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams teaches at a lowly community college, to the embarrassment of his college roommate, MIT professor Stellan Skarsgård. Again his brilliance lies in how he refuses the values of a system that prefers hierarchy to humanity. But his job is only so humble—he’s not an adjunct. No one wants to see that. The whole narrative would strain under the weight of this bizarre reality in which a wise life-changing college professor makes less than Ben Affleck at his construction job (the job Affleck hopes, in one of the film’s central monologues, maverick janitor genius Matt Damon will eventually vanish from).

At least one recent movie gets at the dark heart of American higher ed: Emily the Criminal. In it, Aubrey Plaza leaves a dead-end job in the gig economy to become a vicious scam artist. Among her motivations: her never-ending student loan debt from art school.

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2022–2023 was actually a big year for labor activism in higher ed. As an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed highlighted, there were strikes at the University of California, the New School, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Eastern Illinois University, Temple University, and Rutgers. At Rutgers, the outcome seemed particularly hopeful. Three faculty unions went on strike, including a union representing adjunct part-time faculty. A key impetus for the strike was the severe inequality between adjunct and grad student compensation, on the one hand, and full-time salaries, on the other. According to a statement by the university president, the new post-strike contract provides a “43.8 percent increase in the per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers over the four years of the contract and… significantly strengthens their job security. Additionally, it will increase the minimum salary for postdoctoral fellows and associates by 27.9 percent… [G]raduate students, in addition to receiving health care coverage and free tuition and fees, will see their 10-month salaries increase to $40,000 over the course of the contract.” 

Graduate students in my department make less than $10,000 per year. Adjuncts make $2,820 for teaching a course exactly like those I teach, so even if they taught a full-time lecturer’s course load of 4 courses per semester, 8 per year (which, again, most institutions won’t permit, thus driving adjuncts to patch together work at multiple colleges), this would make for an annual salary of $22,560, without benefits or job security. Adjuncts in Ohio, because of the part-time nature of their contracts, are not considered “employees” according to our SERB and so have no direct path to unionization.

At the New School in NYC, a 3-week fall 2022 strike by unionized adjunct faculty—according to the New York Times, “nearly 90 percent of the [New School’s] faculty is made up of untenured adjunct professors and lecturers”—resulted in a pay rate increase that, over five years, took the pay ceiling for a three-credit course from $5,753 to “$7,820, a 36 percent rise.” This is an important victory, but I’m still not sure how you can live in New York City on that pay rate. If you were wondering: “the total cost to attend the New School, including tuition, fees and on-campus living expenses, was $78,744 in 2021–22, an increase of 7 percent over the previous year.” When it comes to labor disputes like the New School’s, administration can rely on parents’ distress about how a strike will interrupt their kids’ (expensive) education. Yet they shouldn’t underestimate how disturbed parents may be to learn about the absurdly low pay of instructors. If someone is paying, say, $35–79k per year (including some financial aid) for an elite education, they do not expect the teachers involved to be making way less than that. That starts to look like a scam.

If you want to shock anyone anywhere—a student in your office; a TV writer on the picket line; a Republican-ish relative—just tell them how little an adjunct makes. People think they must have misunderstood you. Their jaws may literally, actually drop. They say: “Wait, $3,000 for the whole semester?” One student instantly said: “My dad makes so much more than that, and I swear to god he does nothing.”

It feels redundant to write about adjuncting. What’s the point in repeating what’s everywhere? Am I just a passing car, honking? I began my career, a literary writer and editor working in higher ed, as a second-generation adjunct, succeeding my mother in line for low pay, disrespect, and exploitative conditions. (Such are the origins of adjuncting: part-time gigs for women, while men got the good jobs.) I now have a full-time tenure-track faculty job. Having attained this status, I thought there would be opportunities to do more about adjunctification, but professors don’t make the budgets. We don’t get the graduate assistant raises or the new full-time job lines we doggedly request. Universities talk about diversity, but how can you diversify if you don’t hire? Or maybe they’re OK with the present situation, in which exploited part-time faculty ranks are more diverse than fairly paid full-time faculty. Unsurprisingly, in higher ed as everywhere, workers’ opinions on their working conditions are often unwelcome. And it doesn’t help that increasingly, we full-timers are drowning in work, since so many faculty and staff jobs have been cut while the university and its student needs expand. Every email or administrative task falls on one of fewer and fewer people, often someone without tenure, since tenure gives people permission to go ahead and check on out. 

As the saying goes: this is not your father’s professor job. 

It is, however, your mother’s.

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A key issue in the WGA strike is what we might call generational equity. Mid-career and senior writers are dismayed at how new writers face worse conditions than they did starting out. They want the next generation of workers in their field to have stability, a solid long-term career, the opportunity to do some good work and support yourself and your family. 

There’s been detailed media coverage of the WGA’s immediate issues with pay: how the studios’ use of “mini rooms” and the lack of residuals have aggressively cut into writers’ income and made it much harder, even for those working on successful shows, to make a reliable decent living. Especially since all the work is in New York and LA, two of the world’s most expensive cities. (E.g.: my friend and I popped into an apartment’s open house in her LA neighborhood, just curious. Like many new apartments these days, it was designed for single young professionals, not families, and was truly small. The rent was over $3,000/month. The landlady conducting the tour suggested helpfully that the sole closet could instead be used as an office, for Zooming. She was wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed her a Wild Aloof Rebel. When asked what brought her to the neighborhood, she shared that her husband was “actually an investor.” This is not a situation meant for working people.)

It’s traditional, of course, for bosses to try to break a workforce’s organization by setting up two tiers of contracts: better for senior folks, worse for newcomers. Strong unions, in industries lucky enough to have them, will push back and consider this an existential issue. 

But the WGA’s fight for generational equity goes beyond issues of pay and contracts, too, and includes concerns that are harder to quantify—concerns that may only be known through the lacks and absences they later create. First: the question of training. With the rise of streaming, shorter seasons, and all the studios’ cost-cutting measures, fewer TV writers are hired to be on set now, and so fewer get to be involved in and learn from production. This disrupts the longstanding apprenticeship model through which writers worked on-set and learned producing, showrunning, and management skills, and thus rose up through ascending levels of seniority, responsibility, project management, creative control. Discussions of this workforce issue had been appearing in the media well before the strike—in May 2022, for example, an article in Vice was titled “Television Is in a Showrunning Crisis.”

Second: the threat of AI. In negotiations, the WGA proposed contract terms stating that “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material; can’t be used as source material; and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI” (the acronym MBA refers to the WGA’s collective bargaining agreement). These terms were all rejected by the AMPTP. Perhaps the starkness of the rejection suggested the importance of the issue. After all, the 2007–2008 writers’ strike was prescient in its anticipation of the rise of streaming and the urgency of revising pay structures in response. This time around, writers seem to have hit on another key point: both for studios looking to slash labor costs and for the broader culture, anxious about the AI dystopia to come. In TV writing, the most immediate concern is not that AI could replace writers entirely—while AI is already in some kind of use in many creative fields, it doesn’t yet have that capability—but how jobs for writers could be degraded into editing AI-generated scripts, and how studios could use a vast archive of human labor (previously written scripts, which they’d use to train AI) to make new money, all without paying the people whose work they’re using. 

Beyond even that is the question of what AI-made TV would mean for us all: what if our cultural work, the products of our imagination, were made not by humans but by machines? “You need humans for the humanities,” one strike sign said, to the best of my imperfect human memory. Perhaps even more importantly—as the strike and the conversations in the culture around it are arguing—you need the humanities for humans. It’s not just jobs that are at stake. If unpaid for-profit corporate-owned AI does our imagining for us, we can barely imagine what we might lose.

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On generational equity, and the lack thereof: why, in higher ed, wasn’t this natural defense mechanism triggered, in which senior workers see how junior workers are getting fucked over and act? Why didn’t, and don’t, we see this cross-generational solidarity? How did we get into this situation, where one worker may be paid 4–5 times as much as another for teaching the exact same class? Half our workforce makes less than they would working in food service, after investing 5–10 years into difficult, expensive college and graduate education (complete with loan debt) and building complex skill sets and specialized knowledge. This failure can’t just be due to lack of union representation because we have some union representation. It’s true that it happened gradually, and that people did and do try to fight back. 

The war that the WGA is currently fighting—against the gig-ification of their jobs and the abandonment of new workers in the field to low-wage contingency—looks a lot like the war higher ed already lost.

I think higher ed lost for two broad sets of reasons, one external and one internal: 1) Hostility toward education and teaching. Both centrists and the right wing have put in decades of energy badmouthing teachers and cutting funds for public education, trying to privatize and to limit the spread of “liberal” ideas. Teaching is feminized work (“a labor of love”) that shouldn’t be overpaid (after all, we get the summers off! Or kind of, anyway), and teachers are viewed with suspicion, challenges to the authority of the family. America is an often anti-intellectual culture, and teaching is not quite seen as “real work.” College teaching especially is viewed as an elite profession, whose workers think they’re better than you. As a corollary, most people in mainstream culture, even those with college educations, really don’t know about adjuncting and how bad it’s gotten—it’s not visible. And 2) Elitism: college teaching does in fact view itself as an elite profession, many people in it are deeply invested in myths of meritocracy, and most people in senior positions have historically great jobs and don’t have to care (they may choose to care! But positionally they don’t have to) how bad it’s gotten for others. 

This second cause grows out of a skill gap interestingly resonant with the training and mentorship concerns of the writers’ strike. Traditionally, college professors get hired for their qualifications in research (a doctoral dissertation, an MFA thesis) and their potential as teachers in a field (that is, what they teach more than how). Thus traditionally, professors get hired more for their individual achievements and potential than for their ability to collaborate or contribute to a collective endeavor (like, say, a writers’ room). When we picture brilliant teaching and scholarship, we picture genius individuals (“O captain! My captain!”), not great departments working together. The organizational, administrative, and interpersonal skills needed to participate in a workplace day-to-day, answer emails, perform service across the institution and field, help organize and run a good program—for decades, these were barely sought out in hires nor instilled in new workers. Higher ed runs on a model of faculty “shared governance,” in which, at least in its ideal version, teachers participate in decisions about how the educational institution runs. But—especially strange given that education is our work—higher ed has largely neglected to train its workers in how to do that governance. In my experience in academia, if a department or program doesn’t have enough organizational and administrative skill in its workforce, it just overloads the workers who do happen to have those skills, and that’s that. Higher ed workplaces tend to pay little attention to culture or to labor problem-solving. (Like they’re above such concerns, maybe?) Try to address these concerns and you may find your efforts aren’t welcome—in higher ed, as Sara Ahmed has said, “when you expose a problem you pose a problem.” 

Even more strangely, this lack is echoed at the profession’s most fundamental levels: college instructors receive very little training in how to teach. Once you’ve proved yourself in your academic field, it’s assumed you can more or less figure out the actual teaching. It’s all “learn as you go”—you pick up tips on pedagogy and practical skills from conversations with peers or occasional chats with mentors, or from the internet or a library book, or from your own blank terror, standing in front of a class. I’m a teacher, but I’ve never had any formal instruction inhow to teach—other than a kind conversation once while I was adjuncting, with an insightful tenure-track guy who observed my class. I was never anyone’s teaching assistant; no one who was senior to me ever trained me. When I first started teaching college, I had no idea how to be an effective teacher, or even how to run a 75-minute class session, except through remembering classes I’d taken and trying sweatily to reverse engineer them. There are three branches to a professor’s job: teaching, research (which includes creative work), and service. Our traditional professional training involves incredibly intensive years-long training in research, no or minimal training in teaching, and no training in service. 

Obviously this is bananas. Who runs a profession this way? We do. Who benefits? Clearly not us. 

This fake-it-till-you-make-it structure sets workers up for fear and insecurity. And insecurity, especially in people with some power, causes its own problems. Years of intensely hierarchical “peer” review by senior colleagues, who determine if we get to keep our jobs, hardly help foster a culture of mutuality and collaboration. People who have felt ill-prepared, insecure, defensive, overworked, and anxious for years can’t just get over it when they’re promoted into stability. This isn’t a structure likely to result in worker solidarity, generosity, or taking a risk on someone else’s behalf.

Solving the problems of higher ed will require both imagination—for its workers to see ourselves and one another differently—and money. To get the money, we’ll need the imagination.  

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This strike’s inciting incidents are derivative. Everything new is old. Some of us will have smartphones and electric vehicles; others will mine the cobalt. Some people will get rich on AI; others will lose their jobs; others will be data labeling for a low wage. The seeming tech miracle of AI is based on human labor, and human labor is needed to run it (and like always, this includes prison labor). All of that is repackaged, made invisible, so that the kings of Silicon Valley can get their cut. Students with rich parents will be taught by teachers and enter the long history of the humanities; poor students will get taught by AI. (During lockdown, all of us teachers got plenty of emails trying to sell us bots—they could help us teach bigger classes, the pitch went, and a bot could respond to student comments, and grade…) 

I was making no money while reading a great poetry book recently, Fugue & Strike by the poet Joe Hall. The second half of the book is about garbage strikes throughout history—what happens when the people who haul society’s shit and trash refuse to do it? I came across this sentence: “Counter to technological utopian thought, automation will only displace labor, creating segregated zones where what is left to the human is intensive consumption and segregated zones for the most brutal forms of material and affective disposal labor.” 

Segregation and inequality. It’s an old story. The WGA is out there warning us about it again. Originality isn’t required. The point is not who was the best trash-hauler in the field, the most maverick newsie. I think it matters who writes TV and what’s on it, not because I think TV is great important art—sometimes it is, mostly it isn’t. A lot of novels aren’t great either. A lot of scholarship is disappointing. So what? The point is, people are working on them. People are making something for and with each other, something that steps even just a little outside of the everyday grind and slog. TV and movies make up my brain and my thinking, even if I don’t want them to. What I do at work all day makes up my life, even if I don’t want it to, even if I literally don’t want to do it. Any moment of play and imagination glimmers. You don’t know what you’ll use it for, or what your own efforts will get used for. Marvel movies are surely ruining everything, but when my dad was dying from a brain tumor, I cried wildly while watching Logan. I can close my eyes and remember that movie. When women at my job text each other jokes and memes, our jobs get better, our lives get better. We start to work for each other’s causes, each other’s projects, we learn more from each other. 

It’s very hard to change culture. But also every little thing you do is culture. You can start small. Recently my friend Caryl Pagel and I surveyed dozens of adjuncts in our region, made a list of recommendations that would improve their working conditions, shared this with local schools. This may not be revolutionary, but I don’t think that’s something anyone gets to know in advance. So, you can walk back and forth in a crosswalk or in front of the Netflix building for a few hours. At the orange cone where you turn and circle back, some jokesters will be playing the theme song from Succession and dancing and high-fiving your sign with their sign. The war is everywhere but it’s not over. It feels good to get in there and find your little fight.

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This essay appears in print in Cleveland Review of Books, Vol. 01.