An ugly traffic accident closed the Cahuenga Pass and made us (my friend Adam Rodman and Yours Truly) late for the Writers Guild Informational Meeting this evening. This was a gathering in a ballroom at the Sheraton Universal to update members of the state of the current negotiations and I think I heard enough to be able to file this report.
The old deal expired at 12:01 AM on Sunday, May 2 and we continue to work without a contract as our Negotiating Committee seeks to hammer out an acceptable new three-year contract with the AMPTP (i.e., "The Producers"). At the moment, that doesn't look easy. The biggest issue is that the Writers Guild Health Plan Fund is running out of cash owing to the national increase in medical costs. In the last few years, the WGA has had to cut back on benefits and change eligibility rules to kick a lot of writers off the plan. To prevent further reductions, the WGA needs to get the employers to kick in around $43 million over the next three years. The Producers are offering $10.6…and this is the best part of their offer. In several other key areas, they are offering nothing at all and there are even places where they want us to take cuts.
So will there be a strike? Not yet. The current plan of the WGA is to go on working without a contract. We have also proposed a modest one-year deal that will allow some of these issues to be discussed at length between now and then. I tend to doubt the Producers will take this. A more likely scenario — this is me speculating — is that they will make a "Last and Final Offer" (they make a lot of those) perhaps in the next few days which will add another ten or fifteen million to the Health Plan. They'll say, "This offer is good for X days," X being the length of time they think it would take the membership to accept or reject, and they will threaten explicitly or implicitly that there will be a lockout if it is not accepted at the end of that period.
I don't know what the mood of the membership is…I honestly don't. We have a total membership of around 9000, and I couldn't get a fix on the militancy of the 500 or so in attendance, let alone those who didn't brave the traffic in the Cahuenga Pass to show up. Everyone present was curious and concerned and eager to learn more but beyond that, you had a wide range of views in the room. Some people are clearly angry enough about the low Health Plan offer and the issues that have gone unaddressed. At times, I think we get bewildered that the Producers, while bragging about huge profits in the press, turn around and plead poverty when we ask for enough money to stay even. We have had WGA strikes that were about little more than the studios' desire to save ten million dollars or some other amount that is trivial to them. It wasn't that long ago that Disney gave Mike Ovitz a $90 million severance package for leaving…and yet all the major studios collectively are horrified at the thought of kicking in around three million apiece to keep our Health Plan intact. That kind of inequality does make some writers outraged enough to go on strike and there are others who simply feel they don't have any choice. If your salary and benefits keep getting whittled away, eventually you have to take a stand against that.
For what it's worth, I remain pessimistic that the Producers will come across with what anyone would call a Fair Deal. Well, let me amend that. They'll call whatever they offer us a Fair Deal and insist they can't come up with another nickel and that it's their Absolutely Final Offer. Like I said, they make a lot of those. One strike, they made five or six Absolutely Final Offers. But their goal, of course, is not to give us a Fair Deal but one they think a slim majority of the Guild will consider just barely acceptable. They have a long history of underestimating us in this regard, which is why the WGA has a long history of going on strike. They may be making the same mistake again.