It's not the glamorous work that people think it is. It can be grueling and dangerous.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Sabus. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Anusha Sakui.

Anusha is a reporter at the LA Times where she covers the behind the scenes of Hollywood,

and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022.

You might remember in 2021, some workers in Hollywood

with the Ayatzi Union were about to go on strike

as they were negotiating for a better deal

with an alliance of movie studios.

They didn't end up doing that,

but it brought a lot of attention

to the labor conditions in Hollywood

and how streaming in particular has been changing the way that Hollywood

works and the way that workers in that industry are compensated. Well, in the next few months,

three more major unions are going to renegotiate their contracts with the studios. And that

means that there's a possibility that another strike could be in the offing.

In particular, the Writers Guild of America, which is the most likely to strike, has to renegotiate

their contract in the next few months. And that means that if they are not able to get the studios

to agree with their demands and to set a fair model for the industry, it's likely that those workers could be

back on the picket line like they were in 2007. Now, this is a really important conversation,

and even though it seems like, you know, an entertainment industry and Hollywood conversation,

it's still very much connected to the tech industry as well, because a lot of these

transformations, a lot of these changes, a lot of these problems that workers are experiencing are the result of how much production has shifted from, you know, traditional cinema showing or going on broadcast or cable television over to streaming services.

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