Why I’m running to be the next president of WGA West
The first obligation of our Guild is to safeguard the interests of its most at risk members — to ensure that the sacrifices leadership asks us to take do not disadvantage the vulnerable or favor, however inadvertently, our more privileged union brethren.
That is what my father, a 40-year union man and proud shop steward, who walked the picket lines against Ma Bell, taught me. He had next to nothing himself, but he had more than the operator walking the line beside him, so he shared what little he had with her, and in doing so, strengthened them both. He called this “service.” This is what unions do, and what members provide for their unions.
And this is why I now run for Guild office — to serve, and to share every resource I have in order to help strengthen and honor the core values of the only Guild I ever wanted to join.
Effective leadership is guided by transparency, honesty, integrity and above all — by listening.
We are writers first. Many of us work across multiple forms and platforms, a necessary response to our rapidly changing industry ecosystem. The guiding principle of my leadership will be to listen — to hear — the concerns of our membership — in all its diversity — in shaping a dynamic and forward-thinking policy.
I’m a loyal Guild member with questions and concerns. To address the elephant in the room — I’ve had these questions and concerns for months leading up to and continuing through the current AMBA action. Because our Guild’s storied history is a shining example of how to tolerate and encourage freedom of expression in all its forms — I speak frankly and encourage all to speak similarly, with a respect, civility, curiosity and empathy for opposing arguments.
To be clear, reform to the practice of packaging and the collection of packaging fees and elimination of agency conflict of interests is necessary.
Current leadership has brought these issues into the light, and for that, we should all be grateful. Writers deserve and should demand complete transparency from their reps, and any agent who doesn’t agree with that basic principle shouldn’t represent us. Full stop.
But I also believe a negotiated agreement that includes capturing a new income stream to benefit the most vulnerable members of our Guild rather than our most wealthy and successful members is the only reasonable way forward.
We won’t reach a resolution with stalemates, entrenched thinking, a reliance on lawsuits that may or may not resolve in our favor after years of litigation, and a refusal to talk to the other side. Of that much, I am convinced.
Leadership has asked for “sacrifice” from membership. Leadership has told us that some of us will “suffer.” That these are necessary conditions to achieve progress.
This is absolutely acceptable rhetoric in a strike. There is no question that we’d follow the lead on sacrifice and suffering then. But this is not a strike, and the most vulnerable of us — newer members, women, people of color, LGBTQ… in short, anyone who does not have a lucrative overall deal or existing fat feature contracts — these members are, indeed, bearing the brunt of the suffering and sacrifice.
So, we are obligated to work swiftly, efficiently, and fairly with the agencies to resolve this action, before careers disappear. And they will, believe me — unless we unite to hold our agents accountable for abusive practices, and in the process make concrete monetary gains for members who need it most. United, we can do this.
We’ll need that unity in the crucial AMPTP MBA negotiations next year, when the battle for residuals across all platforms will determine how we survive as writers in this business.
It’s the single most important battle we’ll fight for our future earnings. And we can’t successfully fight that battle if we’re not focused on preparing for it. We must forge healthy bonds with both the DGA and SAG-AFTRA in order to smartly address this pivotal issue.
Residuals affect every single member of our Guild.
We got left behind with DVDs; we can’t afford to get left behind again. Coupled with evaporating backends as studio and streamer buyouts proliferate by the day, we’ll find ourselves stripped of ownership and control of our work. We feature writers already know what that feels like to greater or lesser extents. We mustn’t allow this trend to continue to take hold across all platforms and formats.
The industry is changing around us, and we must keep up to survive. The only way to do this is to engage in a meaningful and continually evolving conversation with ourselves, with our allies, and with the studios and networks, a conversation focused on strategies for generating new income streams and innovative methods of taking back control of the work we create.
In order to do that, writers must listen to each other. A single person can’t possibly know every answer. But a unified team can discover all the answers.
I am primarily a feature writer. I don’t pretend to share the specificity of knowledge and nuance particular to the needs of television writers in our changing media landscape. I will take counsel from the immensely talented and dedicated showrunners who comprise a vital community within our Guild, and to invite them to form an advisory group in the run-up to the AMPTP MBA negotiations.
Some of the meaningful issues we must address in AMPTP MBA negotiations beyond the preservation of residuals:
WAGES AND FREE WORK
Budgets for writers’ rooms. Show budgets are up as hard production costs have increased in the era of “peak tv,” but by and large the percentage of a show’s budget spent on writing staffs has not increased proportionately. As a result, the money available to pay individual writers has not increased even as the money spent to make individual shows has soared. We must support showrunner efforts to use their power to organize against studios and networks to gain a larger percentage of show budgets dedicated to writing staff.
Span protection (due in part to the proliferation of short orders) must be addressed aggressively, and creatively, to recognize that the media landscape is shifting seismically — and continues to shift. As the world of television has changed and production time has expanded, as well as locations for filming becoming often more distant, yearly income for working writers has plummeted as they are asked to work longer for much less to make the same (or fewer) number of episodes over a much longer period of time.
Many individual writers are trying to solve these issues in various ways; we need a more unified approach to the problem. Collective action is our greatest strength. But we must have better strategies for how to deploy that action.
The Guild has negotiated some span protections, but they do not yet go far enough to address what has become a systemic problem. We can build on that success. But we need allies and we need creative thinking, and we need to recognize that this is a fight with the AMPTP. It’s the Companies who have created this downward pressure, due to market pressures and the drive to maximize their own profits. If we want to share in the profits that our work creates, it’s the Companies we need to fight to maintain our income and our protections in this new world of shifting paradigms.
Staff writers should be paid episodic script fees. Full stop. It is reprehensible that they are not.
Endless free pitching across the board — this must go. Writers hustling for weeks or sometimes months, going from meeting to meeting, is free work. Even without leave-behinds. The more time we spend pitching, the less we make. Not a good calculus.
One-step deals, which are in reality often three and four step deals without pay for all feature writers, regardless of income strata, but an especially serious problem for writers working at or just above scale. Leadership negotiating for even one additional step for writers working at scale would make an enormous difference, financially AND emotionally — few of us work at our best when we feel we have one shot and one shot only before the guillotine drops.
Sweepstakes pitching — though there are some rules in place to arm writers with information — if you ask a studio how many writers are coming in for a pitch, they must tell you — it’s left up to writers to ask in the first place. And many writers don’t know they can ask. Even if a writer armed with the information enters into the fray, it’s still free work…
… and free work is banned by our MBA. Which leads me to:
ENFORCEMENT
The Guild already has both the means and the mandate to better enforce our working rules.
Our latest annual report reveals a healthy surplus. Let’s take some of that surplus and hire dedicated enforcement staff to handle reported violations of our working rules, including late payments and breach of MBA provisions in our contracts. Often, the Guild is the only ally of our most vulnerable members.
DUES
Because of the way the MBA is structured, there is an uneven obligation in the way dues are calculated and paid, which does have an impact on the Companies’ contribution to PH&W. This issue requires in-depth data-driven study, and acknowledgment that some members of the Guild are bearing an undue burden of the dues that support all our hard-earned Guild benefits. This has been a problem for decades, and it must be addressed.
Unwillingness of Companies to pay more on the contribution level is something that can only be dealt with in the MBA negotiations. But to know what we are asking for, we need to do the research, and have the unity, to come in together with our demands. This will require all the members of our Guild to come together and decide how we want to approach this long-term inequity, before we bring that solution to the 2020 negotiations to demand changes from the AMPTP.
The list of what we can accomplish is endless, but none of it can be accomplished or even addressed before we regroup and re-open negotiations with the agencies so that we are in the strongest possible position as we enter the AMPTP MBA negotiations.
Like I said, no single writer has all the answers. A team of writers working in unison can find all the answers. To that end, I urge you to join me in voting for a team I’d be proud to find those answers with: CRAIG MAZIN for Vice-President and NICK JONES, JR. for SECRETARY-TREASURER; and for the Board, JASON FUCHS, MARC GUGGENHEIM, NICHOLAS KAZAN, COURTNEY KEMP, ASHLEY EDWARD MILLER, RASHEED NEWSON, SARAH TREEM, and AYELET WALDMAN.
I thank you for your time and I look forward to listening — and hearing — many of your thoughts and concerns over the coming weeks.
