#PayUpHollywood
FYI there’s a major movement happening on Twitter right now to bring attention to the stagnant lack of livable wages faced by assistants in Hollywood.
These people are the silent backbone of your movies, your television, your video games, all of it. Your stories. Your culture.
If we walked out of our studios, networks, agencies, etc. the entire industry would come to a standstill. Most of these execs making six-figure incomes don’t even know how to use the damn phones.
And most of us can’t live on what we’re paid. The average assistant wage hasn’t increased since 1995. Nineteen. Ninety. Five. And for the record, it’s about $500/week at most, pre-taxes. Every assistant I know, myself included, has one - if not two or three or even four - side jobs in addition to the incredibly demanding hours of our full-time assistant job. And even then we struggle to pay rent or even feed ourselves in the increasingly expensive city that is LA.
Which would maybe be okay if it was just one or two years that we had to put up with before being promoted. But there’s almost no upward mobility left, especially in writer’s rooms. Streaming services and shorter TV seasons mean that assistants are STAYING assistants for 10-15 years.
The result of that is that a lot of people end up walking away, if they even start in the first place. Which again, is fine. Except it means that the people who do stick around, who can afford to live on unlivable wages, are people who don’t rely on that salary in the first place. People who come from money anyway.
And that’s who you’re going to get telling your stories and controlling your culture. Diversity begins at the bottom, and assistant/entry level jobs in Hollywood have become something very few can afford to take on.
So the point of this is that you’re going to start seeing #PayUpHollywood. It started trending last night and has already been covered in several media outlets, but I hadn’t seen it anywhere here yet. So when you do start seeing it, please don’t dismiss this as a problem for a few privileged people. The film industry is one of America’s few massive export industries and there is definitely enough money in it to pay every single assistant a living wage.
I also want to note that the people who started this movement are INCREDIBLY brave. There’s a sense in this industry of ‘a million people are lined up behind you to take your spot’ that causes people - especially at the bottom of the food chain - to be fearful, and rightfully so, of speaking out. Liz Alper and the other people on Twitter who directly called out former employers by name are goddamn heroes.
