CBS News Writers May Be Next on Picket Line

by Tula Connell, Nov 20, 2007

CBS News writers authorized their union, the Writers Guild of America, to call a national strike. Some 500 CBS News television and radio writers have been working under an expired contract since April 2005. 

Broadcast writers across the nation have been on strike since Nov. 5, seeking a contract that includes a formula for fair compensation for their work when it is broadcast on the Internet, downloaded to iPods or cell phones or distributed via DVD. (Check out the video created by writers of the Stephen Colbert show, members of Writers Guild of America, East, for a fun look at why writers are on strike.)

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said today:

The AFL-CIO proudly supports our fellow AFL-CIO union, the Writer’s Guild of America, East, and its sister union, the Writer’s Guild of America, West, in their current fight to win a fair contract for their striking television and screenwriter members. Their members are our nation’s storytellers, their imagination and freedom of expression are national treasures. They are in the struggle of their creative lives, fighting for a rightful share of revenues from the Internet, news media and digital technologies of the 21st century. They simply want what all labor unions want and deserve—to be compensated fairly and respectfully for their work and their contributions to their employers. We proudly stand beside the Writers Guilds in their efforts and join them in solidarity.

The writers have a basic request: Employees should get paid for what they produce. But there’s a lot of money to be made by big corporations if they can prevent the writers from receiving compensation from the growing new media. And that’s why these fat cat producers and CEOs are refusing to negotiate. As David Carr writes yesterday in his New York Times column:

Jorge Zamacona, a Guild member and writer-producer who got his start on “St. Elsewhere” and most recently served as a writer-producer on “Wanted,” since canceled, said that by refusing to negotiate on the future revenues of digital outlets, the studios seemed to be trying to rub them out of the picture for good. 

“They are absolutely trying to break the union,” he said. “My daughter watches streamed versions of ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ and they all include commercials. Why should writers not be paid a small part of that?”

Many of us have called this climate of increasing corporate greed the second Gilded Age. But as in the first Gilded Age, presided over by Karl Rove’s presidential role model William McKinley, corporate avarice thrives unchecked because of the culture created from the top.  

Or, as a scholar quoted in Carr’s article notes: 

We are living in a political economy that assumes workers are going to go backwards in almost every instance.

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