Marc Guggenheim: Why I am running for the WGA board

For the past nineteen years, I have been a proud member of the Writers Guild of America alongside my wife and brothers. My youngest daughter was literally raised on the picket line as my wife and I pushed her in her stroller at only three weeks old. That said, I’ve been less involved in the Guild than I’d care to admit. Politics lie outside my comfort zone and I’ve long resisted raising my hand and risking being noticed.

But our Guild now faces issues that require all of us to get off the bench and get into the game. And so, I am suiting up.

Those issues are complex and manifold, and they are going to require sophisticated and nuanced solutions. The challenges we face are significant, but in trial there is opportunity. With the right leadership, we can not only clear the hurdles we currently face, we can — and we must — position our union for tomorrow, not merely resolve yesterday’s problems.

The expiration of the 2017 WGA Theatrical and Television Basic Agreement is just around the proverbial corner. The next negotiation with the AMPTP comes at a time when feature writers are being taken advantage of by one-step deals and television writers find their incomes depressed by short orders. Meanwhile, the proliferation of streaming services threatens the very existence of the residuals system that our union fought and sacrificed so much for. Make no mistake: These upcoming negotiations will chart the course of our union for the remainder of our careers.

And yet we are woefully unprepared for them.

There is no sign we have any intention of changing our normal strategy of threatening to strike and hoping for the best. No army would go to war with a single nuke in lieu of tanks and soldiers, yet that’s what we do every three years. We need a better strategy. To be clear: A strike threat is a powerful and critical source of leverage. But for too long, it’s been our only source of leverage and, consequently, our only tactic.

As long as I’ve been a member of the Guild, I’ve heard the message we can’t count on the DGA and SAG for support — that either our interests weren’t aligned or their memberships were weak — but perhaps the reason we haven’t worked with our sibling unions is that we haven’t tried particularly hard to. Although it’s generally accepted that the DGA just capitulates, there’s a contrary school of thought that posits they actually make worthy gains in the negotiations because they don’t go into them threatening to burn down the town. At the very least, it’s worth questioning the assumptions we’ve been operating with for the past two decades. After all doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of network television. Er, I mean insanity.

Of even greater concern is the fact that the AMPTP negotiations loom while we are already fighting a two-front war — litigation in state and federal court — against the ATA.

I’ve heard that the Agency Campaign has forged membership solidarity and makes us stronger going into these negotiations, but I have my doubts. For one thing, 95% of the membership voted in favor of the Agency Campaign to give our Negotiating Committee leverage to negotiate — only to see that leverage squandered by voluntarily withdrawing from the bargaining table.

To be clear: We must address the conflicts of interest inherent in packaging and affiliated production. But the belief that we can do so without negotiating with the ATA is naive at best. Equally naive is the notion that the two litigations which we are presently mired in will provide a way forward. I used to be a litigator and I saw firsthand the limitations of our legal system (and that’s before over two years of Trump appointments to the federal bench). Even in the rare instances when justice is done, it takes years to achieve. In the meantime, we are racking up legal fees that will rapidly number in the tens of millions of dollars with no end in sight.

As I said, the issues we face require nuanced solutions. Simply branding our representatives as racketeers isn’t nuanced. Our solidarity brought the agencies to the bargaining table. We need to return there post-haste and hammer out a deal that aligns our interests with that of our representatives. I don’t believe for a moment we aren’t smart enough to work out the negotiated solution the majority of the membership wanted.

At the same time, we have to re-enter these conversations with a focus on the future. The ill-fated negotiations focused almost exclusively on the sharing of backend profits — precisely at a time when backend profits are being eliminated. Don’t get me wrong, I am in favor of revenue sharing, but I’m also in favor of negotiating with an eye to the future so that we’re not just fighting yesterday’s battles.

So what does that future look like? As I said, the issues we face are complex and manifold, but among them we have to address the following:

• SCRIPT PARITY — Staff Writers shouldn’t write for free. Full stop.
• DIVERSITY — We need to do more than merely gather data or encourage diversity hiring, particularly at the upper levels of television staffs. Here’s one idea: Studios and platforms typically require a certain number of upper level writers on staffs. But if that money was redirected towards the lower levels, we could create many more jobs for diverse writers. And more diverse lower level writers means more diverse upper level writers in a matter of years.
• SPAN PROTECTION — Simply put, we need to do much better. We’ve joined the issue with the AMPTP and gotten them to agree in principle, but now we need to craft truly meaningful span protection for television writers.
• ANIMATION JURISDICTION — Animation is writing regardless of whether such writing is for a prime time television show. Period.

Although I have nineteen years in the Guild, I have had zero experience on committees or in a position of leadership. But consider me woke. I’m here now. And I’m ready to serve.

— Marc Guggenheim