If Taylor Swift Can Agree to Strike Demands, the Studios Can, Too

Those of you who have seen the cinematic masterpiece Cats have known this for a while (and if you haven’t seen it yet, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch it), but Taylor Swift is not just a perfume maker and pop star. She is an actor, too, having starred in the greatest misunderstood movie about anthropomorphic cats in a death cult, as well as Valentine’s Day, The Lorax, Amsterdam, and an episode of CSI, a show I’ve personally never watched, but it ran for a hundred years, so I bet some people out there love it.

Look, it may not be the best IMDB credits page, but it’s certainly better than Scott Baio’s, and that guy’s been calling himself an actor for far too long, so she should certainly be allowed to call herself one, too. However, I digress.

Since Swift announced her concert movie The Eras Tour was coming directly to theaters this fall, you may have been wondering how Swift, a SAG-AFTRA member, could have done this without running afoul of the union. Well, the answer is pretty simple: She’s not an overpaid MBA man-baby who thinks their commitment to CoRpOrAtE sYnErGy is far more important than other people’s actual labor. As a result, Swift made an interim agreement with the union. Per Insider.com:

Swift was able to strike an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union of which she’s a member. That means Swift agreed to the union’s last offers to studios, which include higher pay, increased breaks, and better residuals for streaming. 

“She came to us and said she wanted to do this, but only if she could do it the right way under a union contract. And we said, that’s great,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, told IndieWire at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And so she fulfilled all the same criteria as anybody else and has an interim agreement for that production.”

See, David Zaslav? That doesn’t seem so hard, does it? Now it’s your turn to admit labor is important at Warner Bros. Discovery!

Look, any Swiftie can tell you two things about Taylor Swift. The first is she pays fairly and well (look no further than the generous bonuses she gave everyone who worked on the Eras tour). The second is she loves money. (Look no further than the countless variations of each album she puts out, as well as a steady stream of merch.) I mean, her nickname among even the most parasocial of Swifties, who think every move of hers is a hidden message to them alone, is “Capitalist Queen.”

I don’t bring this up to tarnish a woman whose catalog comprises the entirety of my Top 10 most listened-to songs this year and last, but to point out what appears to be a simple fact that is clearly obvious to Swift: Agreeing to SAG-AFTRA’s modest demands will make her money, and again, Taylor Swift loves money.

That belief is clearly paying off since The Eras Tour movie has already broken pre-sale records and I’m the idiot who is absolutely going to get to her screening early so that she can buy the special popcorn and drink Eras merch because I’ll never own a home and some part of me stupidly believes that Taylor Swift merch is the Beanie Babies of 2023 and may one day become its own trading currency, allowing me to use the popcorn bucket to pay rent one post-apocalyptic day in the not-so-distant-future.

Now, let’s compare Swift’s superior decision-making skills to how all the studios are behaving: They’ve allowed the WGA strike to go on since April and SAG-AFTRA to go on strike in July. They clearly think they can wait everyone out and make them literally starve, all the while providing nothing of value to society at large. Can Disney CEO Bob Iger sing “Memories” with a straight face while CGI-ed as a cat like Jennifer Hudson can?! I don’t think so.

The strikes in Hollywood are about nothing other than corporate greed. Labor is what our economy is built on. The dirty secret here is that CEOs are responsible to shareholders, not employees. As a result, the studios have ground an entire industry to a halt just to appease people who have no real vested interest in art, only in a return on their investment. As Taylor Swift is demonstrating, that’s just pure zero-sum-game greed. You can still make your money and agree to union demands. The studios simply don’t want to because they think what they provide is more important than the labor that allows them to exist, and they ultimately don’t feel like spreading their wealth to the people who make the wealth for them in the first place.

(featured image: Noam Galai/Getty Images for MTV)