Angelina Burnett for the 2017 WGAw Board of Directors

I’m a writer. But I am running for the board as an organizer.

Back in 2007 I was still an assistant. I’d been slinging coffee and rolling calls for what felt like half a lifetime and had finally landed a job where a promotion to the writing staff seemed probable should we get a second season. But we didn’t even finish the first one. Instead, I found myself walking in a circle with my boss in front of Fox, wearing a plain red t-shirt I’d bought special for the occasion. I hadn’t yet experienced the gleeful relief of a green envelope during a lean time, or the comfort of excellent health insurance when my asthma would flair at two in the morning. I used to sit awake all night on the edge of the tub, overdosing on the “sample” inhaler a friend’s doctor had slipped me, a scalding hot shower billowing steam behind. I knew someday the Guild would change my life, so despite the fear and anxiety, I was proud to walk with you. It only took a few tours of the main gate for the fear to fade and this warm sense of solidarity to take its place. Not long after, he gave that speech… Yes we can.

I joined the Obama campaign the next morning, at first as a full time volunteer, and later as a staffer, running the border state program in Nevada. The unsung song of the 08 campaign was the organizer training tens of thousands of us received (including, I suspect, a number of WGA members). It was designed by a man named Marshall Ganz who learned to organize under Cesar Chavez at the United Farm Workers. He codified their methods into an organizing practice rooted in storytelling and spread across a decentralized structure. Before we learned about team building, data management and phone banks, we learned how to tell stories that forged bonds, shifted people’s emotional states, and inspired them to take action. Over the next nine months, we built collective power through relationships, one story at a time.

We are a Guild of storytellers. And a Guild’s currency is power. Our capacity is vast. This last negotiation was an impressive feat of organizing in which we should all be proud, and serving as a contract captain was the greatest sense of accomplishment I’ve felt in a campaign since 2008. But we have nowhere near tapped our ability to generate power, and the challenges ahead require as much of it as we can build. The more powerful we are, the less likely a strike. The more powerful we are, the more successful we are at enforcement. The more powerful we are, the better able we are to shift the culture of our profession. The strategies and tactics necessary to address the myriad of issues facing members are varied. The common requirement is power. Our power lies in one another. In our solidarity.

Over the last month I have met with well over a dozen staff and board members, current and former. I have been impressed at every turn by their intelligence, thoughtfulness, care and deep concern for the well being of writers, by their quiet dedication, by the small but meaningful changes they’ve enacted that improve our Guild. I have also met a number of my fellow candidates. You will be in good hands, whom ever you elect. But I believe my skills and experience as an organizer make me a valuable voice in our leadership. None of us has the perfect solution to our problems, but I have a unique perspective to offer as we work together to solve them.

I am particularly interested in building power through the CAPTAINS PROGRAM. In 2007, guild staff built a Maserati of an organizing machine in the strike captains program. After we got a deal, they parked her in the garage and threw a dust cover over her. Yes, show captains have been continuously recruited (I was one of them) but almost always, the role is viewed as an annoyance that gets dumped on the lowest level writer in the room, who happens to be the person least equipped to fill the role should it become activated. It is unfair and unproductive to expect a staff writer to have a conversation with her showrunner about a strike authorization vote.

In the run up to this last negotiation, our Daytona 500 pit crew of a staff stormed into the garage, tossed aside the dust cover, changed the tires and oil, gassed her up and got her back on the track in record time. She performed better than anyone anticipated. But just because we pulled it off this time, doesn’t mean we should cut it that close ever again. Especially when there is no good reason to put the car back in the garage. There are plenty of short trips in a low gear to keep her motor running and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Yes, we only negotiate once every three years. But we are concerned with enforcement year round. We are concerned with the culture of our community year round. Name an issue you care about and I can come up with a way for the captains program to play a role in addressing it. Of course we don’t have the capacity to address every issue, nor would it make strategic sense to do so. But there is no reason not to give dedicated Captains ways to remain active in between contested negotiations when we have challenges that can not be met by our contract.

Keeping the program active in this way not only better positions us to achieve important short term goals while working our organizing muscles, better preparing us for the next contentious negotiation, but it develops leadership. The work cultivates engaged, educated, effective members with strong relationships throughout the Guild. Many a current and former board member I met with spoke of a steep learning curve when they joined leadership. All of them met the challenge, but why are we making the position more difficult that it needs to be? A strong, ongoing captains program cultivates leaders and better prepares them to serve once elected.

Over the last few months, a number of captains have come together in conversation with staff to reconsider and strengthen the program. I am excited by the potential we’re developing and I would be a stalwart advocate for the program on the board.

Beyond strengthening our organizing structure, my concerns for our Guild are predicated on two unshakeable beliefs: The work we do is of immense value, economically and culturally. We all do better when we all do better, and that means taking care of one another.

ENFORCEMENT: Late pay, free work, bake offs, paper teams, coercing writers to work multiple seasons at staff writer level (this one really makes me want to punch someone). The solutions to all of these challenges and more lie in collective action, not collective bargaining. A bunch of us (certainly more than just the board) have to come together with staff, agree on a strategic course of action, commit to each other and the plan, then execute it. Yes, we have been talking around these issues for years, dealing with them in an ad hoc fashion, and made little systemic progress. But we have not yet attacked any of them with a focused grassroots campaign. Sounds like a job for the captains program, doesn’t it? I’m excited to see what we can accomplish together.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND ACCESS: “Diversity and Inclusion” frames a deep cultural challenge as having a check box solution. For example, the diversity writer program is a meager and unserious nod toward addressing the inequity in television. It is structured to ensure a face of color in the room, nothing more. The studios put together a pot of money that covers the cost of a diversity hire at staff writer level. As far as the showrunner is concerned, she’s got a free writer. But what’s her incentive to bring that staff writer back as story editor if she doesn’t hit it out of the park? Especially if the studio is inflexible about her budget. After all, once the staff writer bumps up, her salary is coming out of the show’s budget. Most likely, she’ll be let go, and new diversity writer will be brought in, who’s “free”. I know a writer who spent five seasons as a staff writer. FIVE. Which means (more on this in a bit) for five seasons, she didn’t get paid for her scripts. That is… excuse me… Fucking insane. The diversity writer program isn’t even in the vicinity of good enough. And while we can and should advocate for the studios to restructure the pot of money so that there are financial incentives at multiple levels, even if we were successful, it wouldn’t address the deep cultural problem — We will only develop a membership that reflects the diversity of this country through mentorship. And people tend to mentor people who look like them. Yes, there are dozens of mentorship programs focused on diversity. They should continue. There should be more. But I am here because a family member cracked a door for me, then wonderful bosses hired and mentored me. Mentorship cannot just be a program. It must be an intentional part of the way we do business, who we hire and recommend, not just in our rooms, but as assistants, interns, and PAs.

The work that has been done in the last few years around this challenge has been meaningful, even though it feels as though little progress has been made. I sat in a workshop with an upper level writer who had an epiphany about his hiring practices around race. I watched his perspective shift. It was beautiful and heartening, but it required a hard conversation. We can and should do more, but this is a long haul organizing challenge the goal of which is to change the culture of our business. It happens one conversation at a time. It’s not easy, it’s not fast, and it needs all the champions in leadership it can get.

EXPANSION OF JURISDICTION (or The Future): The more members we have willing to wield collective power to ensure fair compensation, the better prepared we are for the future. Animation, reality, variety, news and game shows… We should be seeking to make strategic gains, where ever we can. As the daughter of a songwriter and producer, I grew up with a front row seat to the death of the middle class in the record business. Through a combination of technological good fortune and collective power, film and television writers have managed to avoid that fate. But the internet is not the final frontier. More and more of our work will move to streaming. Then there will be what’s next… There is no end to our fight for fair compensation. The more members, the greater our power, the better prepared we are for the future.

CONTRACT NEGOTIATION: As we are three years out, I will be brief about the issues I find most egregious and deserving of priority in negotiations when the time comes. Script Parity. With a single exception, my entire career has been in cable. I am paid less for the scripts I write than those who work in network. This fact is long past acceptable. Staff Writer Script Fees. Whether or not they’re page one rewritten, they did the work. I’ve seen upper-level writers get completely rewritten. They still get paid. And lets not forget the experienced writers, many of them of color, who’ve been stuck at staff writer for multiple seasons. This is thievery of their time and talents. SVOD. It’s terrible. We know this. Paid Parental Leave. I don’t have kids, I don’t want them. But over the course of the contract negotiation’s member meetings, I heard two stories that moved me to be an advocate for this issue. One from a father who had to go back to work the day after his daughter was born, and another from a mother who had worked out a deal with her showrunner to take time with her newborn while still being paid. The studio found out and clawed the money back. I don’t expect this issue to ever affect me, but I’m willing to fight for it.

POLITICAL POWER: Just as I want more internal power for our membership through increased organizing, I want more external power for our Guild, politically. The PAC has done impressive work over the last decade, considering its nascent state and modest funds. They have been effective in ensuring writers have a voice in federal policy around areas of net neutrality and media consolidation. But its lobbying has remained laser focused on issues that specifically and directly affect the film and television business. And while I understand and respect that strategy, I disagree with it. Writers are human beings. We are affected by a whole host of issues that extend well beyond our profession. As an example, we care about paid family leave and advocated for it in our last negotiation, but we don’t advocate for it at the federal level. And we don’t have any presence on the state level from which to advocate. As with internal organizing, we do not have the capacity to address every issue in this fashion, nor is it good strategy to attempt to do so. But we can and should be doing more. A handful of our members can afford to max out at candidate fundraisers, having their voices heard directly, but that is not the case for the vast majority of us. Individual citizens cannot balance out the power of corporations with out collective power. We have an institutional structure, all around us, with the ability to build and wield more of it in the political arena. And yet we make ourselves small. Expanding our influence requires a cultural shift in how membership views our guild, and its place in our larger community. It also requires considerably more money. I would argue that the $20 you may have sent to John Ossoff would have been better spent donating to our PAC.

PACKAGING: This issue has come up again and again, in personal conversations and in membership meetings. We all hate it. It’s a noxious practice. But ending it requires a level of solidarity I’m not yet convinced we’re capable of. This, like all others, is an organizing challenge. It is for fights like this that we must constantly be building power through short term campaigns addressing achievable goals. Wins compound. Power compounds. If we have any hope of winning this battle, and doing so in a way that is worth the fight, we need far more collective power than we currently have. We need stronger relationships. Deeper solidarity. This one will be brutal. And just because we deserve it, doesn’t mean we’ll win. It is no doubt a righteous cause, and one leadership should commit to looking at it from every angle, in order to consider every possible way forward.

In the summer of 2008, in the slow months between the primary and the general, I finally got my first script — a freelance. On the last day of shooting, I got the call from the Nevada field director, offering me a job. I moved to Las Vegas a week later. I watched the cut of my first episode on a laptop from my desk in Nevada HQ. The digital director, with whom I shared an office, narrowed his eyes at me and smirked, “You’re just here for the stories, aren’t you?” I was there because I believed in the work, but the stories were great. My writing life and my organizing life are inextricably intertwined. The pilot I wrote about my time on the campaign got me my next job. I’ve done my best not to take a show that will keep me working through a crucial election cycle. I’ve divided my time between making television I care about, and electing candidates I care about by recruiting and training new organizers. It is these ten years of experience that I believe make me an excellent candidate for the board. Fellow members, it would be an honor to serve you.

You may view my list of endorsements here.