Members of the Writers Guild of America West held a solidarity rally with striking union employees on Tuesday, urging their leaders to reach a fair contract with the 115 members of the Writers Guild Staff Union (WGSU).
“These staffers do so many foundational things. They process our residuals. They process late pay claims. They do a lot of the things writers don’t want to do so we can focus on our work, and we want them to be treated fairly by our own union,” said WGAW captain Joe Russo, who was among the 120 people on the picket line.
With the WGSU negotiating committee set to resume contract talks on Tuesday evening, the grassroots support from the writers they are in regular contact with was something that the staffers hoped would push guild leadership to go beyond what they say has been “surface-level bargaining” over the past six months on a contract. The strike is happening just as the WGA itself inches closer to the start of its own contract negotiations with Hollywood studios next month.
While WGSU representatives told TheWrap last week that they were not aiming their strike messaging or strategy directly at the writers they usually serve as WGA staffers, many WGA members came to know the union employees thanks to the 2023 strike, when staffers played key roles in various parts of the work stoppage, such as strike captain training, picket line coordination and rally organizing.
For WGAW captains Jackie Penn and Phillip Walker, that communication with staffers continued right up to the start of the strike last Tuesday, when they were informed by staffers during a captains’ informational meeting that the WGSU strike was about to begin.
“We would not have survived the 2023 strike without the staffers. They were the first to show up on the picket lines before any writers showed up and they were the last to leave at the end of the day,” said Penn, who is also a vice chair on the WGAW Committee for Black Writers.
“What they’re asking for is perfectly reasonable, and the fact that our own union refuses to give them this sends the wrong message right as we’re about to begin talks with the AMPTP,” added Walker. “We need our union to practice what it preaches.”
The WGSU went public in its efforts to organize last April, but say that over the past six months, the WGAW leadership has not bargained with them in good faith, providing little movement on their counterproposals.
Among the issues the WGSU is looking to address in the contract is protections against the use of artificial intelligence software to surveil employees and monitor performance and just cause protections, including due process through arbitration. The staffers are also calling for union scale wage with larger annual increases than what writers receive in their contract with Hollywood studios, something that the WGSU said is necessary because unlike writers, they do not have agents to negotiate over-scale pay.
“They would leave the room, and come back with few, if any, changes to their counterproposal. We’d spend five hours giving them a full pass back, and they come back in 10 minutes. I was shocked by that,” bargaining committee member Kayley Nagle told TheWrap of management’s tactics last week.
The WGSU also accuses the WGAW of unfair labor practices, including wrongful termination of three members. The first termination came last April, a day before the WGSU went public, while the other two came in November during negotiations.
WGAW has said in statements that the unfair labor charges are “without merit,” claiming on its website that the firing last April was due to “performance issues” while the two subsequent firings were for cause with the members represented by the Pacific Northwest Staff Union, under whom the WGSU is organized.
“During the course of 19 negotiating sessions since September, the Guild has offered the staff union comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and working conditions,” the statement read, adding that the guild “will continue to prepare for the upcoming MBA negotiations, and management staff will carry on the core functions of the Guild. We look forward to a resolution of a first contract with the staff union.”
Despite the assurances from leadership, writer CK Kiechel, who served as a 2023 strike captain, believes that it is important for WGAW to reach a fair agreement with the WGSU before the start of talks with the studios and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which is set to begin on March 16.
“Why are we brick-walling our own people who are facilitating our careers for us every single day?” she said. “We need to get our house in order before we can present a united front to the AMPTP.”
The post WGA Members Throw Support Behind Striking Guild Staffers: ‘We Would Not Have Survived 2023 Without Them’ appeared first on TheWrap.
