The American Prospect sat down with the presidents of the Writers Guild of America, which is now wrapping up its second full week of a strike, and the Screen Actors Guild.

The dispute that led to the strike is at its core about giving writers a cut of the money studios bring in from publishing shows on the Internet, so it’s to be expected that new media would be involved anyway.

From the interview:

TAP: A lot of the organizing around this is going on through new media, through blogs, Facebook – the very new media that you’re working to get a piece of.

Patric Valone [WGA-West]: [Writers and actors] can get together and actually do media without these guys and get it delivered. It goes back to this quote from Frances Coppola about 12 years ago, where he said that he wasn’t going to make the next Godfather, it was going to be some 7-year-old girl with a digital camera. But how was she going to distribute it? Well, now we have the answer. We now have this distribution model that really seriously impacts the ability of the conglomerates to control production and distribution. What can help them survive in that brave new world is collaboration with the content providers, and yet it seems as though a routine has developed where they would rather try to find the cheaper way or the non-union way, or an approach that cuts us out.

This strike also shows the new face of unionism and collective bargaining in the 21st Century. The writers guild uses its blog to organize updates and informations for members, as well as post videos from the picket lines. Thanks to the tremendous talent and solidarity of writers and actors, guild members are producing dozens of hilarious videos that quickly go viral.

Harold Meyerson in an article accompanying the interview explains what’s at stake:

Last year, however, NBC-Universal asked the writers of “The Office” to create two-to-three-minute “webisodes” of the series for the Internet. Though the webisodes drove up the show’s ratings, the studio paid the writers nothing for their work. The writers, not surprisingly, ceased their webisode writing; the guild sought to negotiate for them with NBC-Universal and got nowhere fast; and the issue of the writers’ right to bargain collectively for Internet work became the crux of the writers’ conflict with the studios.

The day before the strike began, the studios offered the guild jurisdiction over writing on the Internet that is related to existing scripted dramas. Their offer wouldn’t cover the streaming of Letterman’s Top Ten list. It wouldn’t cover any material originally written for Internet delivery, a category that in a few years may encompass all new shows.

Segall acknowledges that devising a contract for new media is conceptually challenging. Since nobody knows how much revenue will initially be produced by entertainment delivered by the Internet, the guild’s position is that the contract should stipulate a percentage of Internet-show revenue, rather than a flat fee, for writers.

The guild’s message is: “If they [the studios] get paid, we must get paid.”

It’s a flexible formula, but the studios are thus far holding out for a contract that will cripple the guild’s ability to bargain for flexible, rigid or any formulas at all.

Nations with more high-tech economies than our own, such as the Scandinavian states, have upgraded technology and increased productivity in ways that have enhanced, rather than diminished, the bargaining power and lives of their workers. In the United States, by contrast, our corporate elites, sometimes using technological innovation as a pretext for their power grabs, have destroyed workers’ bargaining power and kept for themselves almost all the revenue from technologically driven productivity increases. The picketers at Paramount and Disney may look to be a chorus line of wise-asses, but their struggle is a deadly serious test of whether any American workers retain the clout to strike a deal with the unchecked greed that is the modern American corporation.