Actor Sandy Fish lives very simply, on less than $25,000 per year. She helps wash her landlady’s dishes and feed her pets in exchange for a small monthly stipend. In lean times, she eats oatmeal. Her Mill Valley basement apartment, which she rents for $500 per month, has no kitchen, and her shower is outdoors. But she looks on the bright side: She has a view of Mount Tamalpais.

“I live better than anyone,” she told The Chronicle.

She laughs when she reads headlines that say$104,000 in annual earnings is considered low-incomein the Bay Area and wonders, “What are these people spending their money on?”

Since 1983, Fish has been a proud member of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union, which represents 160,000 film and TV artists and other broadcast professionals. So in 2015, when she booked a recurring role on the Netflix series “Sense8,” she was thrilled about the prospect of earning union-guaranteed residuals into perpetuity, on top of the $6,000 she’d make for filming six episodes. The residuals, maybe $500 to $700 per quarter, wouldn’t be enough to live on, she knew, but to her, they could make a huge difference.

“When I get residuals, that’s when I live a little more normally,” she said. “I go to the dentist.”

Residuals in streaming media are a major sticking point in SAG-AFTRA’s strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Other points of contention include the use of artificial intelligence to replace actors and bread-and-butter issues such as wages and benefits.

“AMPTP member companies entered the negotiations with SAG-AFTRA with the goal of forging a new, mutually beneficial contract,” the alliance said in a statement when the two organizations’ previous contract expired July 13. It described its offers for pay and residual increases as “historic.”

Residuals, not filming, account for most of the income many actors earn from their onscreen work. The idea behind them is that if a film or TV show is successful — if it gets syndicated or rerun or sold as DVDs — actors should get a share of that profit. San Francisco actor George Maguire, who has been a SAG-AFTRA member since 1980, gave the example of his small role in the 1999 movie “Fight Club.” He made $4,000 from four days of filming, but in the years since, he estimates he has netted an additional $20,000 to $25,000 in residuals.

Fish got her “Sense8” residuals as expected, until they suddenly stopped arriving in February 2021. After months of inquiries to both her union and Netflix, she learned that there was no mistake.

“Sense8” used an old version of what’s called a low-budget subscription video on demand contract, which was codified in a 2014 agreement between SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP, as streaming’s popularity rose. No more residuals were coming to her, even though Netflix is still streaming the show and profiting from her and others’ performances. Such an agreement, Fish said, is tantamount to “stealing millions of dollars” from actors.

The Bay Area chapter of SAG-AFTRA has 4,500 members, but the strike affects more than just the livelihoods of actors and other workers on shoots, and more than just audiences’ relentless demand for new content. Manijeh Fata, executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission, noted that in fiscal year 2022, 343 producers for feature and corporate films, commercials and other projects spent at least $24 million in the city on expenses such as hotels, lumber, wardrobe, gas and catering.

Filming in San Francisco also creates indirect economic benefits, such as spurring tourism. “You have your film on a big screen, and that’s your window into, ‘That’s incredible. I want to come there,’ ” she said.

Fata believes that spotlighting San Francisco on screen creates still other, less-tangible advantages. “How do we help take back our story of our city?” she asked, referring to frequent recent media headlines that emphasize, and sometimes twist, the city’s challenges.

At a rally outside of San Francisco City Hall on Wednesday, July 26, SAG-AFTRA members and allies depicted themselves as the canaries in the coal mine for the use of AI and other potentially rapacious practices by large corporations.

“这是我的职业生涯on the line,” said Liv Wisely, who’s studying writing at San Francisco State University with hopes of entering the entertainment industry, and whose father, actorMichael Ray Wisely, is a SAG-AFTRA member. “This is the make-or-break point for the next 20 years.”

San Francisco actor Jack Sale, a SAG-AFTRA member for 16 years, said “our image is one of our assets,” referring to the threat of AI in films and TV shows. “It’s a real gift that we give, the deepest part of ourselves,” he went on. “I don’t want to be replaced.”

And if it can happen to actors, he warned, “this will happen to you.”

Aspiring voice actor Tiffany Delgado of Fairfield expressed a widely held fear: “Imagine your voice being used for a political ad you don’t agree with.”

索诺玛SAG-AFTRA成员安东尼减弱了sign for the recent demonstration. It juxtaposed a one-cent residual check he got in January with the multimillion-dollar salaries of many studio executives. “This is a stark example of what’s been happening,” he explained, adding that rank-and-file members aren’t asking to be paid like Hollywood stars, just for dignity and a fair wage. “We want the things that people want.”

Earlier this month, industry trade publicationDeadline publisheda quote from an anonymous studio executive about the strike that stated, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”

Oakland SAG-AFTRA member Ezra Reaves called such a strategy not just inhumane, but also unintelligent.

“No one is more resilient when it comes to being broke than actors and writers,” Reaves said. “You’re going to bleed actors and writers out? We already don’t make any money! We’ll just go back to bartending.”

Meanwhile, Fish is cobbling together an income from modeling gigs and through working once a week with an older adult with dementia, where she can draw on an acting skill — saying the same things over and over again with equal enthusiasm — in a new way.

“An artist is never poor,” she said. “The poor people are these people that are stealing millions of dollars. They don’t need it. It’s just so, so, so sad.”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com