I know you're a business owner but you side with big business every time ... You seem like a good dude who is a good boss but most big business people aren't like you. They don't care about their employees, just their profit margin. And companies like Costco show you can have profit while taking care of the people you employ.
Also, I may be a lowly factory worker right now but I used to be a magazine editor for 6 years. And what little I DO remember from my time back then, writers don't have the kind of structure you have in your business.
The producers CAN afford to pay the writers better... They just refuse to. Because then it eats into their exorbitant salaries (David Zaslav makes over 200 million while they're cutting costs everywhere else at Warner Bros Discovery). The Japanese will cut executive salaries (even the CEOs and presidents) to help pull their companies up because they understand the company wouldn't have been successful without their workers.
Movie productions live and die at the box office off the backs of their writers... It only makes sense to make sure they're well compensated. What form that takes is up to those at the negotiating table.
I dont own a business. Never have never will. Seems like too much risk and headaches. I just work at companies my entire career.
All them are Fortune 500 kinds of companies (some bigger than others), all profit oriented. One was private. The rest publicly traded where the entire office is hit over the head with making the monthly or quarterly number. So there's pressure, especially on the sales department which is always the one to drive revenue. My kind of role can help support it as we approve and analyze large deals, but were more about analysis, tracking costs and submissions.
As much as a bad rap big business gets, I have never seen draconian stereotypes like scroogey bosses, paying people shit or anything like that. People fired are typically bad performers, bad attitude or from restructurings (I got let go when two divisions merged and they gassed probably like 20 of us). People make good money as a whole (but not techie Google kinds of salaries which are not the norm). So I find it hard to believe media is an industry where everyone at the company gets paid bad except star performers and execs.
At the end of the day, if media companies pay everyone bad and the owners and stars hoard the money, all I can reiterate is that the value provided just isnt there and there's a ton of replacements on the wings. Thats probably why they offer low wages. I'm not saying that as a bad critique, it's just supply and demand. The nature of writers work doesn't seem to be FT steady work either like most people hired for jobs. Instead it seems unstable with whatever content the company needs at that time or season.
That doesn't mean pay has to be bad, just not needed or valued. Why does a plumber who has zero steady work able to charge $80 to show up and then another $80/hr to fix something? Anyone will pay this unless they are handy and can fix it themselves. I'm not. It's valuable work I need done. I'll pay no question asked.
On the other hand, I've never paid for spotify or NF sub plans except leaching off my bro's NF account for two years which I stopped. I dont care because I'll just listen to radio stations and watch sports on TV and read silly social media stuff and post of GAF. I cant remember the last time I bought a magazine I wanted read. The last one I think I bought was a Raptors Championship collectors magazine from 2019. I never even opened it. It's on my shelf as collectors item. I cant remember the last magazine before that. That's not a knock on you and your former job, but just the nature of things. That's why every store's magazine section is a fraction the size of what it was decades ago.
