As the Writers Guild of America strike enters its sixth week, members are taking to social media to turn their wrath toward Apple TV+, using the hashtag #BadApple during a “day of action” to call out the Silicon Valley streamer during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference for overworking writers for minimal pay.
“For Apple, the cost of our proposals is just $17 million per year. Last year, Apple reported almost $400 billion in revenue,” tweeted WGA captain Olga Lexell. “The cost of settling is reasonable, so what is Apple waiting for?”
Members also shared stories of how Apple TV+ has frequently employed the use of minirooms, which require showrunners to hire staff for a writers room to write more scripts for a series before it is even greenlit.
Several writers say that they have done the same amount of work in minirooms as they would for a traditional room, only to see their projects not get greenlit.
And one WGA member Julia Fontana, says she still hasn’t even been paid, detailing her plight in a Twitter thread.
“I agreed to take scale, which I hadn’t done since the start of my career, because the showrunner was a friend and I LOVED his premise,” Fontana recounted. “After the room wrapped, each writer spent months writing and rewriting their ep, taking notes from the platform and talking to each other to make sure our eps tracked (the show was a period thriller mystery romance, so super serialized.)”
Along with continued picket lines in New York and Los Angeles, WGA members are staging protests outside of Apple stores in Washington D.C., Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as outside the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, where the Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place.
WGA members are handing out leaflets to WWDC attendees calling on Apple CEO Tim Cook to push Apple TV+ to return to the negotiating table with other studios that are members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and negotiate with the WGA on all elements of its proposed contract. That is unlikely to happen for at least several more weeks, as the AMPTP is set to begin labor negotiations with SAG-AFTRA later this week.
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