The Writers Strike is justified

This is a post I made to a forum questioning why the WGA would like to get reality show writers in their fold. I will try to give a little perspective to the union issue from personal experience. I worked at a country radio station in a group of radio stations (2) in the mid '90's. We were members of AFTRA (American Federation of Radio & Television Artists). For those of you who think the union people are overpaid, be it known I was making $7.60 an hour at the time, union minimum. When radio was deregulated and companies could start buying up a ton of stations instead of owning only 7 AM, 7FM total and only one of each in each city (market) our group began by buying our country competition. That meant that if we were fired, as talent, we had nowhere to go in town and there was no other country station to be offered a job from to create a competitive balance for talent. The group, at the time in negotiations with our union, hired 'tons' of part time talent for rates above union minimum & promised them the moon if they voted out the union. The union was dumped, the new hires got fired and from that point on pro union employees were fired or never got another raise. Well, 2 years later I did get a 1 cent per hour raise. Talk about predjudice... The new hires were fired and they reverted to hiring people for minimum wage. Illegal? Yes. Proveable? No. Moral of the story is the union wants all eligible writers (those who write for major networks and any other venue they cover) to have the same protection they have. That is why they want the reality writers in their fold. If not, they are subject to the same abuse we got when the union was voted out. The owners & suits have control and you have no bargaining power. That means, like Siegal & Schuster, who created Superman, have no rights or income from their creation from future films, tv, cartoons, reprints of the material they wrote or drew, or merchandising. They were paid a weekly (nominal) wage for their work and the company owns their creation(s) and benefits forever from any sales of that work, be it DVD, internet....any media, while the creators get nothing. That is not fair. Writers, on the surface, are paid well, but in tv & film they don't work much and that income has to last during the times when they are unemployed, which for the majority of writers, is most of the time.