Reality TV Workers and Walkouts

Last week, the postproduction crew of the reality television show Survivor walked off the job and formed picket lines outside the production company’s Santa Barbara headquarters. The editors and producers had requested contract negotiations with Mark Burnett’s Island Post Productions, and an agreement including “industry-standard health insurance and pension benefits,” but had not gotten a response, according to Deadline.

The strike ended twelve hours later when the company agreed to recognize the workers as members of the MotionPicture Editors Guild (MPEG). So the much-feared delay of the premiere of season 29, Survivor: San Juan Del Sur — Blood Vs. Water, has been averted after all.

The work is still conditional, however. “The strike isn’t over until the contract’s done, so they could walk at any time,” Ron Kutak, MPEG’s national executive director, told Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC.com. Resnikoff describes how reality television tends to be an exception to the high union membership rates of other aspects of show business. Freelance agreements between production companies and workers are the norm, and overtime pay is rare. For instance, Survivor and shows like it don’t have “writers,” per se, even though the producers do engineer and shape just about everything that the “actors” say and do.

In the current issue of The Baffler, Todd VanDerWerff traces the origins and contributing factors of the explosion of the modern-day reality television industry, from An American Family in the 1970s on PBS and beyond. He writes:

The appeal of such programming for fledgling cable channels was soon plain enough: no matter what any network has to pay to keep a reality show going, it’s far less than the cost of any equivalently scripted half hour of dramatic or sitcom programming. Scripted comedies and dramas require actors and writers—and the hefty, union-mandated fees that guild members in Hollywood command. But reality shows don’t run up such costs, and occasionally can be made without any union-represented personnel whatsoever. The savings over a scripted show are substantial, and the ratings breakout potential remains huge. […]

[T]he East Coast headquarters of the WGA issued a report on rampant wage theft against reality production crews; the research sample was a small group of online poll respondents, but the results are eye-opening even so. Of the poll’s 315 respondents, 60 percent said they routinely worked more than eight hours a day, and 85 percent said they had never received any overtime pay. The WGA collected information on the labor practices of at least seventeen different production companies and found that they were liable for as much as $40 million in unpaid back wages. As the report noted, the per-segment production costs for a typical cable reality program are dramatically lower than the costs for union-staffed scripted shows: $225,000 to $425,000 for a reality hit like Pawn Stars, for example, and between $2 and $2.5 million for a drama on the USA cable network. Even the big, glitzy network reality shows, which rely on standard reserves of behind-the-scenes union labor, still fall significantly below the costs of the average scripted program.

VanDerWerff also explores how the power imbalance within the industry is reflected and amplified by its shows’ contents. Most production companies are in Los Angeles or New York, but some of the most popular reality TV stars—like the cast of Honey Boo Boo, and Duck Dynasty—have been discovered in struggling American small towns.

“The official voice of the programs remains condescending toward working-class and middle-class people—precisely because the shows arose out of an attempt to cut the working-class contingent of Hollywood labor out of the picture as much as possible,” VanDerWerff writes.

Read the entire piece, “Looks Like a Duck, Quacks Like Reality TV,” here.