A closer look
Cast members of the hit sitcom Friends banded together in 1997 to collectively negotiate their salaries, threatening to strike until they were all paid equally, which eventually led to an unprecedented $1 million per episode for each actor by the final seasons. Before this, studios routinely pitted actors against each other to keep wages low, but David Schwimmer encouraged the group to leverage their collective star power. It is genuinely hilarious that a show entirely based on financially unstable twenty-somethings drinking coffee all day became the ultimate masterclass in cutthroat corporate labor unionizing. Thanks to their aggressive solidarity, they now make around $20 million a year purely in syndication royalties for doing absolutely nothing but aging comfortably while we endlessly rewatch them
