Contract talks between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and Writers Guild of America ended Monday without an agreement, raising the specter of a writers strike starting as soon as Tuesday.
“Negotiations between the AMPTP and the WGA concluded without an agreement today,” the AMPTP said in a statement issued Monday night.” The AMPTP presented a comprehensive package proposal to the Guild last night which included generous increases in compensation for writers as well as improvements in streaming residuals. The AMPTP also indicated to the WGA that it is prepared to improve that offer, but was unwilling to do so because of the magnitude of other proposals still on the table that the Guild continues to insist upon. The primary sticking points are “mandatory staffing,” and “duration of employment” — Guild proposals that would require a company to staff a show with a certain number of writers for a specified period of time, whether needed or not.
“The AMPTP member companies remain united in their desire to reach a deal that is mutually beneficial to writers and the health and longevity of the industry, and to avoid hardship to the thousands of employees who depend upon the industry for their livelihoods.
“The AMPTP is willing to engage in discussions with the WGA in an effort to break this logjam.
The current WGA contract expires at midnight tonight.
The two sides began negotiations on March 20. The guild and studios have met regularly since with no reports of fireworks at the bargaining table at AMPTP headquarters in Sherman Oaks. The WGA also flexed its members muscle by conducting a strike authorization vote from April 11-17. Just shy of 98% of voters gave their OK for the WGA board to call a strike against Hollywood’s largest employers. The WGA’s latest strike authorization vote also drew a record voter turnout at 79% of eligible members in the WGA West and WGA East.
The impact of a strike would be far-reaching. Not only would a strike gradually shut down film and TV production across the country, the economic shock would have a ripple effect throughout Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta and other production hubs. According to FilmLA, production in Los Angeles has slowed sharply over the past three months, dropping 24% compared with the first quarter of last year. Though it is difficult to disentangle the effects of broader corporate reorganizations and the cost-cutting that has accompanied these moves, FilmLA president Paul Audley says the labor situation “seems to have delayed the start of some programming.”
That’s the opposite of what happened just ahead of the 2007 writers strike, when studios accelerated production in the months before the deadline.
This round of bargaining comes at the end of a decadelong ramp-up in TV production. From 2009 to 2019, the number of working TV writers increased by 70%, according to guild data, bringing a flood of fresh talent into the business. Newer writers typically make minimum salaries — $4,546 per week for a staff writer or $7,412 for anyone above entry level. The boom has greatly expanded the number of writing jobs available in a year, but it also led to structural changes that dramatically changed the way writers get paid, as well as the nature of how they work. More recently, less-experienced writers have struggled to break in as more seasoned writers are the first choices for jobs that run for a shorter number of weeks than the 27-30 week norm of traditional network television.
The pandemic hit in 2020, and then investors started souring on the economics of Netflix and other streaming services two years later, leaving many of those new writers without a clear path forward in their careers.
“A lot of production companies and streamers were doing lots of overproduction of shows,” says David Goodman, past WGA West president and co-chair of the WGA negotiating committee along with another past WGAW president, Christopher Keyser. “We had this peak number of shows that were being made, but that’s now starting to shrink,” Goodman said.
At the same time, the shows that are getting produced have fewer episodes, leaving many writers looking for other jobs or unemployed for most of the year. The guild is seeking to push back with a proposal to set minimum staffing levels for TV. Writers also want a more robust streaming residual, to tide them over in periods of unemployment.
But the companies — faced with a streaming business model that doesn’t generate much profit — seem in no mood to accede to those demands. That has the two sides on a collision course, and it’s not clear that either will blink before May 2.
