The issue about the strike isn't about having a more privileged life than blue-collar people. It's about having sort of, please gods, as privileged a life as blue-collar people... while doing both that work (to support ourselves) and another kind of work from which those who do it never get a day off, from the moment we start it until the day we die.
Because Story will wake you up for attention on your days off, on your weekends, on your holidays (as if 95% of writers ever have any!). And as for the waking hours, they're already toast. Story will interrupt you over your coffee while you're hardly even conscious, in the middle of your normal day's paperwork, at lunch (if you can afford or are allowed time for any), in the throes of orgasm with your spouse. It will haunt you while you're changing out people's catheter bags, and come up to surprise you in the middle of an average workday (per a discussion about the Battle of Salamis that I had with a specialist while resecting someone's colon). It will leave you in tears, once again, while wrapping yet another patient's dead body.
Plainly the side of the arts in which you've been working isn't Story. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If you haven't been paying attention to the increasing levels of crap that US-based writers (and, also, others elsewhere) have been dealing with... you need to seek out some education at best speed.
Most of us are lower-paid and (to judge by our income) lower- or middle-class. For the last half-century or so, thousands of writers whose labors you've enjoyed have worked in a storytelling ecology that's supported the vast majority of independent/freelance screen storytellers in making a modest or supplemental living. (For example: my only Star Trek: The Next Generation script earned me about $14,000 [my split of $28K with my co-writer]. After that, low-and-dwindling yearly residuals in the low 4 figures continued for some years after. That's long done, now... but it bought a lot of groceries and cat food while it lasted, while I was also working other jobs.)
That ecology, though, has steadily had the blood sucked out of it with the shift to streaming—when the streamers told us, at the last Guild negotiations, "Nobody knows if this'll work. We'll make it up to you later if it does...!").
...Guess what? It worked. And now they don't want to make it up to us. (And somehow it's hard to be surprised.)
The old writer-payment ecology, as a result, is gone. It's not as if our stories are worth less than they were. (Indeed, evidence suggests far otherwise.) It's not as if the Earth's orbit's changed, or something's occurred that's had nothing to do with human actions. It's because rich people at the top of rich studios and streaming companies have decided they've got better use for the companies' billions of [insert favorite currency, it doesn't matter which one] than fairly paying their writers.
Some of us actually remember how things were before a workable system was broken, and can compare them to how they are now... bearing in mind what we were promised. As a result, better-known storytellers like Neil (and others: it's too late in the evening for me to do your homework for you...) are on strike now to assist those of us who're not so well known. People like me, for whom $14,000, spread over a whole year (or two, or three, or five...) made a big difference in our lives... not like the few hundred dollars now being offered to writers who've done a whole lot more work over a far shorter term.
In the larger sense: it'd be just lovely if the world were so arranged that all of us who prefer to mostly do creative work—because it's what we know best, and do best—were easily able to share (perceived) middle-class labor time around with those who don't do it (like something out of Le Guin's The Dispossessed). …Though most of us have also been doing second or third jobs as well. I don't know any writer who's grudged that if it meant also being able to do the work we love best.
It'd also be lovely if those whose privilege (as per your description) allows them access to higher education could understand the challenges of those whose situation didn't allow them anything of the kind. For example: I was lucky enough to pull down a Science and Nursing scholarship at the end of high school... otherwise my lower-middle-class family's finances couldn't have afforded me any other higher education at all. I happily worked to support myself all during my nursing training, and special-duty nursing kept me alive until my first few novels sold and made enough to kept me afloat.
That was just fine...for me. But I don't see why writers more talented than I (and who can tell who they are?), who've got more than I have to give to the world, should have to work two or three jobs to support their writing.
And I don't see why, having lived through the multiple-job bullshit, your vision should supersede other, less onerous ones. I mean, I’m sorry for the stuff you went through… but don’t see any reason why others should need to go through the same. (“I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn…” is so 1970s.)
Anyway. For the time being, everyday working writers are fighting that corner right now, the only way we can: by withdrawing our middle-class [by definition of middle-or-low-five-figure-USD$] labor from the people making themselves rich off it. And isn't it funny that the people from whom we've withdrawn it are so desperately trying—via AI, etc.—to find a way to do without our labor entirely? (As if what would pass for daily donut money for most series is somehow too expensive...?) It kinda indicates that (color-of-collar) class isn't at all the issue here.
Understandable, then, that you might be glad you're retired... and not down in the trenches with the rest of us. Those of us still working hard to survive (including me, still writing at 71 despite theoretical "retirement ages"—impossible for us to consider in this "new world" economy…) hope to survive long enough, if we're as lucky as you, to eventually, have something similar.
Meanwhile, those of us who weave stories for the entertainment of those around us would just like to make enough from this work to buy groceries and pay our electric bills and feed our spouses (for those of us who have spouses), or kids (those of us who have kids). ...Or cats. (etc) You know: the kind of things that ordinary blue-collar people have.
And for their sake: just as the writers before us (in the 1960s) fought for the right to the then-revolutionary concept of residuals, we fight. Not just for ourselves, but for the writers to come after us, who also have spouses and kids*... and tales worth telling.
