When several Hollywood studios reached an agreement with the Writers Guild of America last weekend, ending a strike that had lasted 100 days, the film director, Michael Moore, called it “an historic moment for labour in this country”. The film and television writers had been demanding (and got) a percentage of revenues that Hollywood earns by selling its products online. They also wanted (but did not get) the right to negotiate for workers on animated films and reality television shows. The strike’s end is a relief to American movie junkies, who will now get to watch the Academy Awards as scheduled next weekend. But is it anything more than that? Do a bunch of Ivy League graduates paid to write gags for situation comedies constitute “labour”?

The WGA behaved as if they do. The architect of the strike was a negotiator who had cut his teeth organising garment and construction workers. His call to the picket lines was backed by other unions, from Broadway stagehands to the powerful Teamsters. Labour organising has historically brought rewards to workers in films. The WGA has been around since the 1930s. One of the greatest Hollywood union leaders was Ronald Reagan, who as president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1960 won the right of actors to royalties (so-called “residuals”) when their films were shown on television. Writers soon got similar, if lesser, rewards.

Labour organising has worked less well since Reagan’s time. In 1988, the writers launched a five-month strike that failed to win them significant residuals from home video rentals, which now make up a bigger part of the movie market than cinema screenings. The writers were duped out of sharing in the last market shift. The next one – the migration of movie content on to the internet – will not necessarily be as lucrative. As movie theatres go the way of Top 40 radio stations, intellectual property may be harder to secure and profit from than in the pre-internet age.

This is a labour problem of a sort, but it is not clear that unions are the means to solve it. There is something self-contradictory about collective bargaining by creative workers. Much of the impetus for organising labour in the industrial age came from the replaceability of individual workers. Creative writers, on the other hand, like to think of themselves as irreplaceable. Some are perhaps more replaceable than they look. The Colbert Report, a late-night satire show, got higher ratings this January when its host was ad-libbing and interviewing celebrities than it did last January when people were actually writing it. But certain writers are irreplaceable and are compensated as such. “A good number of the strikers,” wrote Peter Bart, editor of the Hollywood trade publication Variety, during the strike, “are easily as wealthy as the corporate apparatchiks they now confront.” The salaries of employed writers average in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and can run into the millions. Other members are unemployed most of the time. They are “writers” only if you stretch the term very broadly.

Nor is the WGA the most stratified union in Hollywood. Certain actors in the SAG, which must renegotiate its contract with the studios by this summer, have grown alarmed that many of the union’s members have no real financial stake in whatever agreement is eventually hammered out. A recent letter from several prominent members, including Ben Affleck and Charlie Sheen, warns that “two-thirds of SAG’s 120,000 members consistently earn less than $1,000 a year as SAG actors ... but anyone holding a SAG card can vote on our major contracts”. Who benefits from this kind of union? The vast majority of members work too little to profit from it, while others are too sought after to need it.

The Harvard economist, Richard E. Caves, has defined a “hold-up problem” that besets big cultural companies. Movies require complex multi-stage contracts that involve progressive sinking of costs. At each step, the incentive for creative artists to “hold up” the project (in both senses of the expression) grows. What stops such hold-ups is potential damage to reputation. Maybe unionising protects artists by replacing the reputation-damaging action of hold-ups with the reputation-neutral action of strikes. It thus permits rent-seeking for artists. But unionisation also gives certain advantages to studios, corralling tested writers and actors in one economic system. Top writers’ interests, like those of top actors, are more closely aligned with the interests of their employers, the studios, than with any interests of “labour”.

So when one asks whether the writers won their strike, the answer depends on whom one means by “the writers”. For top writing talents, small residuals on internet programming will add up to big money. For lesser lights, they will add up to nothing. The A-list of superstar wordsmiths has been more tightly bound into the studio system and the B-list has not been much affected. True, film executives warned this week of a reduction in fees, more reality television programming (which does not require WGA writers) and a drastic cutback in “pilots” (trial shows that may never go on air, but which broaden job opportunities for writers below the top rank). This, however, is probably bluster. There is a saturation point for reality TV – at least one hopes there is. And studios were not commissioning pilots out of the goodness of their hearts but because they were an effective means of hedging against dud projects.

The most recent strike was a victory for one union. The writers got more of what they asked for than the film companies did. But in no sense was it a victory for “labour”. On the contrary. It was a protracted, high-stakes battle in which the logic, the hierarchy and the power relations of the information-age marketplace emerged unscathed.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard