Walt Disney cheated his animators out of profits — and their strike changed the world
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike just shy of a month now, with no foreseeable end in sight. Motivated by a breakdown in negotiations with Hollywood studios over pensions, residual compensation for streaming productions, health care, and protections for writers rooms in the wake of AI, the WGA strike represents a fight, in the words of writer-comedian Adam Conover, “for the survival of television and film writing as a sustainable career.”
Disclosure: Rank-and-file staffers at Polygon are members of the Vox Media Union, which is affiliated with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). The Vox Media Union’s collective bargaining agreement is separate from the Minimum Basic Agreement, the labor contract between screenwriters and television and film producers. The current labor dispute between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Writers Guild of America (which consists of the WGAE and its sister union, the Writers Guild of America West) does not involve the newsroom unions that are affiliated with the WGAE.
This ongoing drama over the future of the American entertainment industry is just the latest in a long line of conflicts between collective labor and monopolized power. Given how inevitable those conflicts are, it’s worth looking back at how important they’ve been as well, in terms of shaping the current entertainment landscape. This week marks the 82nd anniversary of a game-changing strike at Walt Disney Animation Studios, one that sent shock waves throughout Hollywood and reshaped the American animation industry as we know it today.
A Century of Disney
The Disney animators’ strike of 1941 wasn’t the first strike of its kind: The Fleischer Studios strike of 1937
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