20.3: The Writers Guild of America in the National Context
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- Miranda Banks & David Hesmondhalgh
- University of California Press
In early November 2007, certain quarters of Los Angeles transformed overnight into walking districts. For the next five months, five days a week, dozens of writers, often spectacled, wearing jeans and T-shirts and always with picket signs, walked for hours in front of various gates of the major Hollywood studios. Across the country, dozens more in New York bundled up and braved the cold to protest their rights of labor and rates of compensation. These professional film and television writers walked en masse to protest stalled negotiations with the American trade organization the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). For the first time in nineteen years, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) was on strike. Nationally, a poll conducted two weeks after negotiations broke off showed that 63 percent of Americans sided with the striking workers (with 4 percent favoring the studios, 33 percent unsure). 19
It is rare in the United States to see striking workers marching in a number of areas across the two largest cities in the country. Even more notable was the fact that these employees were neither blue-collar laborers nor white-collar workers. They were no-collar workers. 20 Unlike earlier strikes, this time writer-producers and showrunners also walked the picket lines, arguing that they could not separate their work as producers from their role as writers. The guild leadership specifically targeted showrunners early in the negotiations to get their support, not just for labor action but to read the letter of the law in such a way that their role as producers could not be separated from their role as writers. While as producers they were part of management, as writers they were employees of the studio. While some faces were familiar—Tina Fey, Rob Reiner—others had names that were familiar to audiences: Norman Lear and James L. Brooks. Still others were attached to beloved products that suddenly disappeared from homes across the globe. Writers were now positioned—in their role marching around the outside of studio buildings—as industry workers fighting for their rights.
The Writers Guild of America was first established as the Screen Writers Guild in 1933, though it was not granted a contract until 1942. The WGA, which comprises East and West branches, is the bargaining agent for professional writers who craft film, television, news, animation, streaming media, and video game scripts for American signatory companies. The Writers Guild has gone on strike six times, in 1959–1960, 1973, 1981, 1985, 1988, and 2007–2008. Three of these industry-wide walkouts were protracted, lasting many months. As they had in every previous strike, in 2007–2008, these American writers marched in circles and demanded their rights, not as artisans but as workers in a media industry. This time, though, because of the globalization of film and television distribution, as well as the rise of YouTube—where many striking writers went to speak directly to audiences—more people than ever before were aware of a strike among working writers. Not just in the United States, but globally. And not just audiences, but other writers as well.
For the writers under its protection, the WGA as a guild provides union-oriented services: it convenes and mobilizes members, addresses their concerns, negotiates and enforces contracts, lobbies on behalf of its members, and represents the face of screenwriters to the outside world. But it is its final directive—preserving the art and craft of writing—that most clearly illuminates the subtle difference between a union and a guild. The WGA sees its protection, teaching, and preservation of the work of writing as the additive dimension that distinguishes it from a traditional trade union.
Yet during moments of economic crisis or labor negotiations, writers often feel compelled to define themselves as a union first and foremost. Bob Barbash, a writer on Zane Grey Theater , explained how this perception played out during a strike in 1960: “A tremendous amount of people in the Guild . . . resent the word ‘union.’ . . . [Every] morning I had to be carrying a picket sign in front of MGM. Now that is not a Guild. That’s a union, man. When you are walking there and you are trying to stop people from crossing the line. We are an unusual group because we like to think of ourselves as [part of a] super, upper [tier of] intelligence. That we don’t work on a loading dock . . . but if you are going to have a union, you are a union.” 21 In contrast, the term guild implies a focus less on working conditions and more on championing the artistry of the profession. The difference is not merely one of terminology: it has resulted in a recurring tug-of-war across the entertainment industries between different groups of writers and sometimes even within an individual writer’s conception of what they do and how their interests ought to be represented. 22 The internal friction is captured in shifting definitional terms such as artist , worker , creative , laborer .
Writers must join the guild if they have surpassed a certain quantity of work with a company that has signed as a contractual partner on the guild’s collective bargaining agreement. A signatory company can be as vast as a multinational corporation or as limited as a small pro-union production company. An associate writer amasses units to gain full membership, and today writers must belong to either the WGA East (which uses the acronym WGAE) or the Writers Guild West (which prefers WGAw), depending on geography. The guild’s stated objectives are voluminous. It contracts minimum rates for specific types of work, determines writers’ screen credits, ensures payment of residuals, provides pensions and health benefits for members, engages in national policy debates concerning writers’ interests, and provides continuing education for members and the community. Some writers have seen their induction into the guild as a sign of having “made it” in the industry. Others have felt membership to be a weighty burden foisted upon them. And still others have paid little attention to what membership meant. Then there are those who view membership as a life raft. Barbara Corday, creator of Cagney & Lacey , expressed deep gratitude for the benefits afforded to veteran writers: “First of all, having residuals. Lifetime medical insurance as a backup to Medicare, as a secondary insurance. How many people outside of Congress have things like that? It’s just phenomenal .” 23
Corralling this disparate group of workers, however, is an arduous task. The guild brings together thousands of individuals who predominantly perform solitary work. As Hal Kanter, creator of the series Julia , noted in the 1970s, “We writers are, collectively, a strange group of creatures and it’s a frequent source of amazement to me that the Guild is such a well-run zoo!” 24 John Furia Jr., writer for The Singing Nun and president of the WGAw from 1973 to 1975, laughed as he pointed out, “We are the most individualistic group to band together.” 25 Phyllis White, who worked on writing teams for various television series from the 1950s through the 1980s, noted the paradox of singular writers with unique voices aligning for a collective cause: “It’s a Guild of individuals as no other union is. You’ve got the Teamsters and there are a certain number of Teamsters who do the same job. . . . They do the same hours. They do the same thing. We don’t. . . . Trying to amalgamate this group . . . [of] nearly 5,000 into one union now is horrendous. It’s amazing that it works at all.” 26 White’s sweeping claims around the specialness of writers’ work are problematic: many trade unions cover diverse members with distinct job descriptions, and the work of writers is not as rarefied as she proclaims. 27 And yet the notion of collecting a community of workers who usually work alone does pose distinct difficulties.
Another major challenge for the Writers Guild is that it coexists with a number of other guilds and unions in the media industries. The other groups that negotiate with signatory companies include the Directors Guild of America (DGA), which represents directors, assistant directors, unit production managers, and production associates; the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which represents actors, extras, broadcast journalists, and puppeteers, among others; and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents a diverse set of industry workers, from electricians to set carpenters, makeup artists, prop masters, cinematographers, editors, and art directors. The other three organizations service vastly larger constituencies than the WGA, and have needs so diverse that a united front proves tricky—especially when it comes time to negotiate with the monolithic Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The AMPTP is an enormous bargaining unit that digests the concerns of hundreds of production companies, networks, and studios and then delivers a proposal—representing the united group’s interests—to the negotiating table. Whereas in standard bargaining a union tries to garner advantage by playing off one company against another, the AMPTP positions itself so that the three creative guilds must jostle with each other, grabbing for scraps at the table. This tactic, called reverse pattern bargaining, forces each guild into what one member called “a kind of a chess game between the three unions.” 28