Jeffrey Whyte sent me a long e-mail from which I am extracting this question for a public reply…
I understand that you have areas of dispute with the Producers. What I don't understand is why you have to strike. Isn't there an alternative?
Yeah…not to strike. And at the moment, no one can afford that, especially since it can only lead to us losing a lot of money and ground and then finding ourselves in the same situation, only worse, when the next contract expires.
The issues here are really pretty simple and you don't have to have an MBA understanding of DVD revenues or a futurist's insight into the evolving Internet market to grasp them. Our old contract has expired. Management has offered us a new and lousy contract that would increase their already-immense profits by taking money out of our pockets in many ways. We don't want the rollbacks. In fact, we think gains are appropriate at this time. We have been given two choices: Take the bad offer or strike. We choose to strike.
That really is all there is to it. Honest.
I don't know what you do for a living, Jeffrey, but I presume you have a job and you get a certain wage for it. Your life is built largely around that salary. The home you live in…the places you eat…the necessities you skimp on and the ones you can afford…they all key off of the size of that salary.
Let us say you work for a company that is very healthy. It is not failing by any definition and its top execs and owners take home mega-sums of money. Tomorrow, they decide to up their profits by cutting everyone's salaries a dime an hour. In that situation, you might shrug and say, "That's too bad but it's not worth making a fuss over." The next week, if your pay is cut another dime an hour, you might wince and say, "Ouch…but it will really screw my life up to quit and go look for another job. So I'll live with it." And then the next week, there's another dime gone and another. And then the cuts start going up — fifteen cents, twenty…then you start losing quarters.
At some point, you have to go, "Whoa! This must stop. I can still make my rent and buy potato chips but there's no justification for these cuts beyond my employer's greed. If they go on long enough, I won't be able to live and I'll have to take a bold stand, maybe even to the point of quitting. Better to do that now than later, after I've lost even more." (And you also may have reasons for drawing that line that aren't strictly monetary. You find that as you roll over for these salary cuts, you lose respect within the company, you feel insulted and even your job has gotten more difficult. Because the folks employing you are learning that they can do just about any damn thing to you and you'll go along with it.)
So you take your stand as we have taken ours. We take ours by striking…not because we love having no income and so much uncertainty in our lives and walking around with signs, but because we really only have the two choices and the other one truly sucks.
You'd like to think there's a third option. On blogs discussing the strike, I sometimes see that — "It didn't have to come to this. If our leadership had handled things differently, we'd have a great deal now instead of a strike." But I never see what that alternative is or was. Even with the benefit of hindsight, those who say the preceding only seem to be able to explain it in vague terms like, "I would have set up a dialogue" or "I would have gone to the negotiating table earlier."
I don't believe there's ever been much of a third option. Why? Because the people we negotiate with — the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers — like it the way it is, with only the two options. It's a system that usually works for them. It may also fill some emotional need they have to control the game and use their very size to intimidate others…but basically, they do it because it usually works. It enables them to grab those dimes. Most unions, when it comes time to negotiate, will give up something rather than plunge into a war. They'll be glad the dimes aren't (yet) dollars and might even hail that as a victory for their side.
The WGA has done it both ways in the past. We've had labor peace since '88 for two reasons. One is that in '88, we said no. We went on strike for 22 weeks in order to say no.
We took a huge rollback in '85. Immense. I think some members from that time are still In Denial as to how much we gave up that year. For obvious reasons, I have a kneejerk defense reflex when anyone belittles Writers but speaking of that contract, I'll say it: We were gutless idiots.
And then in '88, the Producers did what anyone would do when they had someone that stupid on the hook. They handed us another pile of rollback demands — not as huge but still huge — and again, gave us the two choices: Accept this or strike. That year, we struck. You can certainly make the case that in a strict dollars-and-cents accounting, what we gained did not balance against 22 weeks of loss, but that's not the point. We had to stop that pattern or there's no telling how much we'd have lost in subsequent contracts and how destructive it would have been to fight that battle at a later date.
Saying no in '88 was one reason there hasn't been a Writers Strike since the year Michael Dukakis was nominated for President. The other was that eventually, we started saying yes to the dime cuts. The first contract we made after '88 had no real rollbacks in it and actually a few modest gains. (Anyone wonder why that was?) In subsequent deals, we accepted some dime cuts and postponed some areas of contract improvement that we thought were overdue. I'm not sure that those were wise choices on our part. Some would say that our leaders — particularly some leaders who were writer-producers or maybe writer-PRODUCERS — were too reticent to make trouble. Others would say that for various reasons, the will of the membership was just not there. I don't know.
But I do know that this time, the will is there, just as I also know that the dime cuts have turned into dollars. This is the time to stop that tactic again.
I was explaining this yesterday to some folks on the picket line and one said, "There is a third way. We could have worked without a contract until the Screen Actors Guild's contract is almost up and then struck." That's a good point but it isn't a way not to strike. It's just a question of how to strategize that strike. After hearing the pros and cons, I think now is a better time. Sadly but really, it only comes down to the two choices.
One other thing. This is our battle but it's not our battle. Some of the things we're fighting for like increased jurisdiction over Animation, Reality Shows and Game Show are WGA issues. But all that Internet stuff, all that talk about wanting to be paid when our work is streamed over the World Wide Web…that's an issue for the actors and the directors and almost everyone in town. I wish the Screen Actors Guild contract was expiring now and ours was up the middle of next year instead of the other way around, because they may be better equipped to fight that part of the battle. They can shut the town down a lot faster than we can. But that's not the way the expiration dates happened to fall so we're the first ones into the fray. If you're not a fan of strikes — if you're weeping that your favorite shows are suddenly in reruns or endangered — you'd better hope the WGA does well. Because wait'll you see what SAG will do if they get stuck with the same two choices.