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Striking Writers Back at Table |
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As negotiators for striking writers and TV and movie producers return to the bargaining table today, the writers are reaffirming their determination to keep talking until they gain a fair contract.
Members of the Writers Guild have been on strike since Nov. 5. Striking writers and their supporters are on the picket lines at major studios in New York and California in a drive to win an equitable contract that addresses how writers are paid as new media plays a bigger and bigger role in the entertainment industry.
The writers are seeking 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.
Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) President Michael Winship, in a letter to members, says the strike has become a movement
inspiring not only our own membership but folks throughout organized labor, across the country and all over the world. Public support has been overwhelming and inspiring. Our high profile actions have come to symbolize discontent with the status quo in general, and specifically with the overreaching greed of the global mega-corporations that own the media.
Winship called some of the producers’ latest proposals “half-baked.” Although producers claim they are offering writers a $130 million increase, the Writers Guild says, in reality, management has proposed major rollbacks in the rates writers are paid for works used on the Internet.
For example, a writer who writes a 30-minute prime-time TV show takes an 88 percent cut when that show runs on the Internet and a 98 percent cut for reruns on the Internet.
More than 130 daytime soap opera writers signed an ad in the entertainment industry newspaper Variety strongly supporting the strike, when an article in Soap Opera Digest attacked their position and suggested they had no real stake in the strike. WGAE’s Daytime Committee wrote the magazine saying:
Our position is basic: If it’s on a screen and it moves, the Guild covers it. And we want residuals for the re-use of that work.
What that means in real terms for writers is the difference between being able to provide for your family—or not. Having health insurance—or not. Becoming seniors with a union-provided pension—or not. Daytime writers share these concerns with every other writer in the industry.
Writer Andrea Sarvady puts the issues involved in perspective in the Dec. 1 Chicago Sun-Times. She says the strike is simply an issue of fairness and survival:
A misleading statistic bandied about is that the average Writers Guild of America member makes $204,000 a year. The far more significant number is the median writing income—a whopping $5,000 a year. In other words, skim the millionaires off the top and the picture shifts dramatically to one of many underemployed creatives, hoping to stay in the middle class through moonlighting and residuals.
All the writers want is a small cut should massive profits once more be realized. As industry blogger Jan McLaughlin puts it: “Five percent of nothing is nothing. What do the studios lose if Internet entertainment never proves a gold mine? Nothing. If Internet-based entertainment makes money—share. Share with the people who helped you make the magic happen.”
Meanwhile, “Tonight” show host Jay Leno, who has passed out donuts on the picket lines, joined CBS’s David Letterman and NBC colleague Conan O’Brien in agreeing to pay their nonwriting staffs at least through this week and perhaps longer as the strike continues.
Leno agreed to cover the salaries of some 80 nonwriting staff members of the late-night talk show. Leno will reassess the situation week by week, depending on what happens with the contract talks, according to an NBC spokesperson.
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