“If management fails to reach a deal with their unionized writers, picketing would begin on Wednesday, April 24, outside Sesame Workshop’s offices in New York City.” - Writers Guild of America, East
Netflix's "new" section is a throwback to retro content; CEOs got a compensation cut due to shareholder-imposed pay reductions. Iger and Disney face multiple lawsuits from various investor groups. 1/4
An "activist" shareholder, Nelson Peltz, seeks to dismantle Disney. These companies and CEOs hurt themselves and us, they need our work, badly. And will try hard to divide us to get it for nothing. 2/4
"Alone we beg, together we bargain" isn't just for individual people: it means unions working together succeed together. IATSE and Teamsters are up next year and SAG-AFTRA doesn’t have a new contract in place yet. This year we set the tone, next year we bring it home. 4/4 end
We need contractual, legislative & judicial safeguards in place to keep things more fair for everyone on all sides of every deal. We must own & control our likenesses & voices. Full stop.
Laws, courts & contracts will have to make things work better.
CEOs, unfamiliar with labor issues, lack experience and mentors in organized labor. They must grasp that relying on a Victorian labor playbook harms themselves in the 21st century. Collaboration with labor is crucial. Harvard Business Review thinks so too:
“Hollywood will restart, and while studios may pretend that the industry as a whole has to cut back on future projects after the cost of the strikes, it's worth noting that the value of the deals SAG-AFTRA and WGA received are still worth way less than the L studios took by refusing to come to the bargaining table.”
Ok Mr. “Talent friendly CEO,” this is how the world sees you. Is it talent friendly to for roughly 107 days out of 118 refuse to even talk with your talent? Your actions have consequences.
Now, #WGAstrikeshirts is 25% off site wide. As always, all union printed & 100% of net proceeds go to Entertainment Community Fund to help support people impacted by strikes.
"Instead of choosing the easy way out by simply paying writers and actors their fair share to begin with, studios have opted to make this excruciating not just for workers, but for themselves. Back in September, it was reported Warner Bros. Discovery bled $300 to $500 million in this fight..."
I made an orca’s picketing with #SAGAFTRAstrong and #WGAstrong design and you can get it from Threadless on t-shirts and more for adults and kids in various colors. All my proceeds go to The Entertainment Community Fund to support those impacted by the strikes.
“The streaming industry has thrived on data opacity — allowing an industry in the business of fiction to twist the story to how it sees fit with carefully crafted data. Now, there will be real, actual, hard data available to the WGA membership.” https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23891835/wga-contract-summary-ai-streaming-data
Saying that the strike failed is playing into the studio’s hands. WGA considers the strike a victory, and furthermore, the studio downplaying the strike’s agreement is a disinformation campaign they had done before.
Twitter thread by David Slack @/slack2thefuture:
“As WGA leaders meet today to finalize our deal, we begin a new era for writers — and for labor in our industry. But we also begin to face the final and most insidious form of unionbusting propaganda: a years-long effort to sell the lie that our strike was not worth it.
Over the coming days, months, and years, the studios, streamers, and their surrogates will take every opportunity to undermine what we have won together. They will seize on the inevitable consessions and compromises made by our NegCom as proof that we “failed.”
They will urge us to overlook all that we won through hard work and unwavering solidarity. They will claim it wasn’t enough, that we should have gotten X instead of Y, that we lost more by striking than we gained in this new contract. And they will be wrong.
They will tell us that the strike was unnecessary, it was a waste of our time and our savings, that our agents or managers or lawyers could have gotten us everything we won through individual negotiations without anyone having to walk a picket line. Well… then why didn’t they?
As hard as it is to believe right now, these lies can work. They’ve worked before. During our 2017 strike authorization vote, it was shocking to discover how many members believed we lost the ‘07-08 strike, in which we went on strike for the internet — and won the internet.
This didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of years of whispering by studios and anti-union allies. And they don’t just do it because they’re bitter about losing. They push the lie that we used our power and lost because they hope to stop us from using our power to win.
Our strike was necessary because, in our individual negotiations, our employers consistently refused to acknowledge our right and reasonable demands. Because the profound changes we needed could only be won through the unique and overwhelming power of collective bargaining.
Our strike was necessary because our employers made it necessary by driving our income down 23% in 10 years. Because they refused to address free work in features, streaming coverage in comedy-variety, the abuses of mini-rooms and the threat of AI until we withheld our labor
Our strike was necessary. Our strike was effective. Our strike is a victory. If anyone tries to tell you otherwise, it’s ‘cause they never want to see us stand up for ourselves again. Don’t believe it. We won this fight. We’re the WGA, and when we fight, we win. #WGAStrong”
The Writers Strike Is Over: WGA Votes to Lift Strike Order After 148 Days (variety.com)
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike will end at 12:01 a.m. PT on Wednesday.