The Writers Guild of America is back in fighting mode.
After the Hollywood writers’ union and the labor group representing studios and streamers broke off talks late on May 1, the WGA officially called a strike on entertainment companies, its first in 15 years. But the WGA has always been the industry union most likely to walk away during contract negotiations (the guild famously struck for 100 days in 2007-2008, for 153 days in 1988 and 14 days in 1985, and those are just the most recent strikes) and from 2017-2019 took Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies to task for practices they considered to be conflicts of interest — and realized their aims.
Related Stories
Helping to lead the charge this time around in negotiations are WGA West president Meredith Stiehm and negotiating committee co-chairs David Goodman and Chris Keyser. None of them are strangers to a labor battle, having all of them taken part in the 2007-2008 work stoppage and been leaders in the talent agency campaign. “I think the members have never been more united,” says Goodman, reflecting on the former work stoppage. “I think a difference, at least among the membership, [is] of a united membership who voted overwhelmingly around this agenda.” (Nearly 98 percent of WGA members voted to authorize a strike on April 17.)
From the point of view of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which bargains on behalf of major entertainment companies, negotiations ended after the group “presented a comprehensive package proposal” to the union with boosts to compensation and streaming residuals. The biggest sticking points arose from the WGA’s proposals on minimum size of TV staffs and minimum duration of employment, the group said. “The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal,” the AMPTP said Monday night.
After talks concluded and the WGA called a strike on Monday night, the WGA’s Stiehm, Goodman and Keyser sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. From the Sherman Oaks headquarters of the AMPTP, where the parties have been in negotiations since March 20, they discussed where the talks broke down in their view, where WGA was willing to compromise and how they feel about embarking on a strike: “We’re excruciatingly aware of how painful a strike is for everyone,” says Keyser.
Where did the talks break down, in your view? What was the point at which things had to conclude for the night?
David Goodman: Well, the talks were breaking down for a few days. We kept our hopes up that the companies would engage on the serious issues that we’ve raised, but it’s really been in the last few days that the companies were sending signals that they were unwilling to engage with us on the very serious topics of this negotiation. We held out hope. We kept making tries. We made a couple of compromises on some issues in an effort to release the logjam. But it became very clear tonight that they really weren’t interested in making a deal. So it was really the companies’ decision, not ours.
Chris Keyser: We’ve had some indications before the negotiations began that the real problem for writers, the very heart of everything, is that companies were taking money out of writers’ pockets, money that we had won in MBA negotiations, by insisting on paying them at the lowest rate for the least amount of time, all across the industry. In other words, taking what used to be a real career and turning it into a series of gig jobs by more or less eliminating term employment, or reducing it greatly. And what happened in these negotiations, we saw again and again, evidence of that. They would not deal with us on AI; they said, we don’t want to be restricted in using a technology that we might be able to adopt for our purposes. You can imagine what kind of a chill that sent down the spine of all writers. They said in comedy-variety they wanted to institute a day rate. And in television episodic where we’ve seen writers’ weeks diminished again and again, so they can’t possibly make a living off of the shows, they refused to engage us in any guarantees that said that some number of writers have to be employed for some amount of time for the very valuable work they do in creating television shows.
The AMPTP said in their statement that the primary sticking points were “mandatory staffing,” and “duration of employment.” Would you agree with that assessment?
Meredith Stiehm: No, that’s completely disingenuous. They never even discussed that issue with us. We had proposals that they just ignored, six of them, I think, that were television proposals that were important to us, and we waited and waited to have a conversation about it, and they simply did not have the conversation.
Keyser: Right. And that’s part of our larger agenda, to guarantee term employment for writers, we need those things. There’s no guarantee of writers being hired in the MBA. Although over the last 50 years, writers were hired because that’s the way the business has made sense. The companies have attempted in the last couple of years to slowly reduce the number of weeks and the number of writers who are being employed. The stories that we hear every single day from showrunners and from people on their staffs [is they] tell us that the writing profession, the real profession of being a writer, which is only supported by term employment, is going away. And so yeah, those two proposals were part of it, but it was part of a larger package that includes all of those other things, all of which suggest they’re trying to reduce the number of us who are working.
Goodman: AI was something we had on the table that they wouldn’t even talk to us about. There were feature proposals for feature writers that they completely dismissed that involves, again, those same issues that Chris is talking about, of writers being able to maintain a career. And so this idea that it’s just those two things — no, they picked those two things out to highlight them as us being somehow unreasonable, but they’re part of a larger package that they wouldn’t even engage with us design.
So the A.I. offer, you’re saying they wouldn’t provide a counter-offer on that or…?
Stiehm: No.
Goodman: Actually the quote that we got was, well, we don’t want to limit our companies’ ability to make use of that technology, to take advantage of that technology…
Keyser: To study.
Goodman: They offered to do an annual meeting to talk about AI. Probably to talk about how great it is.
Given all this, how far do you feel that you and the AMPTP are at this point?
Goodman: You know, it’s very hard to say. With a union sometimes in order to get what you need, you need to exercise your power. And that’s what we’re doing right now, exercising our power to go on strike, to cut off the pipeline of the work that creates the value for these companies. And so that will really be the determining factor of when we make a deal with the AMPTP — the pain that we’re about to inflict on this business by withholding our work. It’s very hard to know how much pain the companies are willing to put up with before coming back to the table with the deal that we can accept.
Keyser: We did make some progress on a lot of things, but in most areas of negotiations, they fell far short of the kind of guarantees that would really take care of writers going forward. And in features, they did essentially nothing. They wouldn’t take care of feature streaming, in comedy-variety, they did almost nothing, in residuals they did very, very little. And they came back and said to us, “Listen, we can do a lot better on that if you drop every one of your proposals that guarantees that writers will actually have a future in the business.” That’s not the way negotiating works.
Speaking of which, the AMPTP also said that it “presented a comprehensive package proposal to the Guild last night which included generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals.” What was your view on that package?
Goodman: That package has been in talks for, for a while now, that wasn’t presented to us last night. They’ve made certain offers, it’s not in any way generous. The offers that they made are very much in line with the previous MBA negotiations. So the idea that it’s generous is not true. And we started out this negotiation by saying that this couldn’t be a usual negotiation where we get the usual little bumps and that we needed to address serious problems that our members are facing. And so what the companies have done is they’ve tried to dress up what is basically a very similar offer that we’ve gotten in past years, and we can’t put up with it anymore. The analogy that one of our board members came up with was if somebody steals your wallet and hands you back $10, you’re not up $10. And that’s what they’ve been doing for all these years, they’ve been taking this money from us and we have to put a stop to it. We need them to seriously address these problems.
Keyser: They’re offering us a package that’s more or less the same value [of] what they gave us three or six years ago. So it doesn’t even come close to keeping up with inflation, let alone taking care of the fact that writers have steadily seen their wages decline even in all those years when the companies were doing incredibly well. At some point, we have to get some of that back. And so we fall into the same trap of them saying how generous they are in giving us the same amount of money, time and again, and how ungrateful we are, even though they’ve taken that money right back from us in all the days in between our contracts.
Stiehm: We could not have been more clear that this is not a normal negotiation cycle. Our members are feeling like they’re [facing] an existential threat to their very existence as writers. And it fell on deaf ears. We said it over and over again. And what they came back with was the standard stuff and seemed very almost casual. It was like they didn’t hear us. And here we are.
On a brighter note, where was some progress made? You mentioned that there were some issues on which you both were able to reach an agreement.
Goodman: They offered to pay us script fees for staff writers, which was something we’ve been asking for for a long time.
Keyser: We’d asked to create a new level of minimums for writer-producers, which they did. There were a few things. Look, we had leverage going in, the membership voted by almost 98 percent [to authorize a strike]. And so we were able to gain some theoretical things in the MBA that we hadn’t had before. But here’s the cynical way of looking at it: They gave script fees to staff writers for the first time because they no longer are thinking about the meaning of weekly employment. And so for the first time, that was an opening — you know, we’re happy to pay you for the script because we’re not looking to pay many people weekly from here on out.
Did the WGA give any important ground as a means of compromising in the talks?
Goodman: Oh my God, yes. We had many, many, many proposals on the table at the beginning that we traded away in an attempt to move this negotiation forward. We at no point stonewalled the companies. We were always willing to talk, always willing to compromise, always willing to discard the things that we decided weren’t our most important issues. But we had core issues that we needed to address. And on those, we wanted to have a conversation. Like our opening proposals in some of those areas are still on the table, not because we stonewalled, but because the companies refused to talk about them. So they didn’t even give us a chance to make some kind of compromise on them. They wouldn’t even talk about them.
Can you say specifically which of the proposals you were willing to trade for other things?
Keyser: I think there’s two categories. The first thing is in every area where the companies were willing to negotiate, we came down as they went up. So on minimums, on premium minimums for pre-greenlight rooms [“mini rooms”], on all kinds of stuff, we dropped…
Goodman: In a sense it doesn’t matter because you can look at the cost out of our opening proposals, at $600 [million] and we dropped them to like $200 million. I think that we made huge compromises to try to make a deal. We were not naive. We did not go in expecting to get everything we were asking for in exactly the way we presented it. And in many cases, we negotiated in areas they were willing to talk [about], we were willing to talk [about], and we came down the middle. But around the core issues, they refused to have any conversation.
How are you feeling about embarking on the WGA’s first strike in 15 years and what are your hopes for its duration?
Goodman: I think the members have never been more united. We were all three of us part of the strike in 2007. And there’s I think a difference at least among the membership of a united membership who voted overwhelmingly around this agenda. We feel we’re here to fight for these writers. And these writers are here to fight for each other. And in terms of duration or, or what it’s going to be like, that’s impossible to predict. But for tomorrow I’m looking forward to getting out on the picket line and talking to members and hearing what they have to say, as we always have been. We’re all about, how are the members feeling? And at, at this moment I want to get out and get with the members and hear how they’re feeling. And that also will determine our next course [of action].
Keyser: We should also say we’re excruciatingly aware of how painful a strike is for everyone, for our members, for other people in the community. We would’ve done anything we could to avoid this. It’s a terrible thing to be forced to sacrifice for something that you deserve, but it’s a worse thing to give it all up because you’re not willing to fight for what’s yours.
Stiehm: And we have to remember, 9,020 writers asked us to go fight for them because they needed to see change, and 198 voted no. So our unity is incredible, and we didn’t want to have to exercise our power, but now we have to. But the solidarity is so strong. We don’t want a long strike, we didn’t want a strike at all. But the three of us were also all involved in the agency campaign, and I think that campaign really showed the industry that we’re strong, we’re united and we know how to fight. So if we have to fight, we will.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
May 2, 8:27 p.m. Corrected to reflect that Meredith Stiehm was interviewed, not Ellen Stutzman.
