The group representing Hollywood studios fired back on Thursday at claims from striking film and television workers that they have been forced into the “gig economy” because of changes brought by the streaming TV era.

Roughly 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike on Tuesday, saying that studios had “created a gig economy inside a union workforce”.

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents major studios such as Walt Disney Co and Netflix Inc, said writing movies or TV shows in Hollywood “has almost nothing in common with standard ‘gig’ jobs”.