The reality is less romantic. I schlep my kids to public school in a Subaru full of loose Legos and half-crushed Goldfish crackers, then spend the rest of my day in a constant hustle, inventing and pitching in and out of writers’ rooms and producers’ offices. I love my job and I’m lucky to have it. But even after five years, writing on great shows and making work of which I’m proud, I have to worry about every paycheck. And my story is typical.

I know that even in the best of times, it has never been easy to make a living in entertainment. But the issues now — the issues my leadership fought for at the bargaining table — are not unique to Hollywood. They are, in fact, the same issues that are making a middle-class existence precarious everywhere in America, and the world.

Why are writers struggling? It’s not that entertainment is a volatile or unpredictable business, at least not anymore. The Big Six media companies (CBS, Comcast, Disney, Fox, Time Warner and Viacom) have doubled their profits over the past decade — $51 billion in operating profits in 2016 alone, much of that driven by the global popularity of TV and movies written by guild members. Yet, according to W.G.A. statistics, writers like me have seen our incomes decline; average writer-producer compensation in TV is down 23 percent since 2015. Some of this is deliberate, the companies using loopholes to lower labor costs and maximize profit. Some of it is accidental — the rise of the short-season “peak TV” series has produced great shows like “Fargo,” “Mad Men” and “Silicon Valley,” but it also means that writers are held inactive for months between periods of work that pay less and less. All of this as the cost of living in New York and Los Angeles — the cities in which screenwriters must live, for the most part — grows astronomically.

And if we’re not rich, we’re hardly radicals, either. Like many, I’m alarmed by our global inequality problem, but that’s a disease that runs through every sector of our society. And contrary to Hollywood mythology, writers don’t see development executives as the enemy. In reality, they’re our friends and collaborators, and have helped us shepherd peak TV into existence. We don’t even hate the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — they’re negotiators who are good at their jobs, which happen to be maximizing shareholder value at our expense.

The W.G.A. negotiating committee has been sober and pragmatic every step of the way. The threat to strike was never a romantic fantasy out of “Waiting for Lefty” or “Norma Rae,” but a serious and necessary tactic. The W.G.A.’s starting demands were humble — the guild calculated they would cost just one third of 1 percent of the annual profits of the Big Six. And the deal, which awaits ratification, appears to include significant victories for the W.G.A. membership. Writers made gains in salary minimums and contribution increases to our health plan. The guild earned concessions on options and exclusivity, meaning writers won’t be trapped in yearslong contracts for those short-order shows. Writers won increases in residuals for pay TV and streaming video, and for the first time, comedy-variety writers in pay TV will receive residuals. Perhaps most significantly, especially given Hollywood’s gender-equity problem, writers won job protection for parental leave.