In the old e-mailbag, we find a message from Jim Teiner asking…
I don't understand why people who write cartoons aren't in the Writers Guild. Can't you just belong to the union you want to belong to?
Would that it were that easy…
A bit of history. In the forties when the entity that eventually became the Writers Guild of America was being formed, there was little thought of them representing folks who wrote cartoons. For one thing, the organizers had enough trouble then just establishing their right to represent live-action writers. For another, the storylines and gags for cartoons back then were created in a different manner than is today the norm. That work was done by "storymen" who were usually artists and who often dabbled in other phases of production…also drawing or designing characters or such. It seemed right and proper for them to be in the same bargaining unit as other artists.
Those were cartoons for theatrical exhibition, produced on deadlines and budgets quite different from today's animation business. The demands of producing animation for TV, both in terms of schedule and finances, led to cartoons being written in script form, not only much like live-action scripts but in some cases, identical to them and by the same people. Starting as early as The Flintstones, there were folks in Hollywood who made their living as writers of both live-action shows and cartoons. This led to a steadily-increasing yearning on their part to be represented not by Local 839, which then called itself the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Union or somesuch, but by the Writers Guild.
There were many reasons for this yearning but most fell into two categories. One was that it was a hardship for writers who did both to be in two unions. It was (and still is) quite possible to work an awful lot and make a darn good living…but to still fail to qualify for health insurance in either of your two unions. Usually, if you do enough work, you qualify but often, a writer would do 90% of the necessary quantity of work to get health insurance through the WGA and 90% of the work necessary to qualify through 839…and would wind up with a lot of payments going to two unions but no health plan to show for it.
But it was even more unfair than that, which brings us to the second category. Local 839 was designed to represent artists who come in, punch a time clock, sit and draw all day, etc. At times, it has been rather effective for those folks (and at times, not) but the whole structure of the union has understandably been tailored to them. It has never worked as well for people who do what I do. As one example, in the hearings I'll describe in a moment here, we showed the National Labor Relations Board that one year, the highest-earning writer in the business did not qualify for the 839 Health Plan at all, while some writers who earned a lot less did.
That has never been the least of it. Back in the seventies and eighties, most of us writers who were in 839 were amazed not only at how little our union did for us but that the gentleman who was then Business Representative of the union — i.e., the guy who ran things there, ostensibly on our behalf — was openly hostile to our needs. We pointed out to him that the WGA covered matters like arbitration of screen credits, separation of rights, banning "spec" writing, etc., and 839 did not. His response was along the lines of, "I'm too busy to bother with you overpaid whiners."
This was the guy who was in charge of representing us…and you'd think, well, at least we were overpaid, right? I mean, our union got us at least that, didn't it? Amazingly, no. For one thing, we weren't overpaid. We were just paid better than he thought we should be.
The least you expect from your union is that they'll negotiate a decent minimum scale wage for you…enough cash for the lowest-ranked workers (the ones with no clout to demand more) to make an actual living. In fact, the amount that 839 negotiated as scale for writing a cartoon script was so low that most studios raised it voluntarily. Even beginners at some of the stingiest companies in Hollywood received 50% above the fee the union had negotiated for us, and some of us got between double and triple that amount…which still didn't make us overpaid, by the way. We were just in a situation where the amount that our union said was a fair price for a script was an amount that even Bill "Do it as cheap as possible" Hanna was embarrassed to pay anyone. At one other studio, the writers fought a constant battle to not have the rates lowered to union scale. That's how mind-numbingly rotten 839 was back then as far as writers were concerned.
Before I tell you how it's better now, let me explain a bit about how we tried to change unions in the past, prior to the current WGA campaign. I was heavily involved in two separate suits before the National Labor Relations Board, neither of which succeeded. The second attempt was the outright organizing of a non-union studio. We won the case, won an election there and then lost on an appeal due to, I was told, a guy at the N.L.R.B. in Washington (a Reagan appointee) who was notoriously and admittedly opposed to workers being allowed to unionize. The precedents he cited in reversing our win were all later overturned but by that time, it was moot.
The first attempt was a lawsuit to bring about what is called Craft Severance, which means to cut a group of workers out of one union, thereby allowing them to join another. This is very difficult to do under labor law, which traditionally favors continuity over anything else. There are many management/labor relationships that exist today which seem to go contrary to common sense and/or the current statutes but the N.L.R.B. allows them to continue on the assumption that to rearrange things might destabilize an industry that has a long history. (When they do intervene to change things, it usually works to the advantage of the employers.) The desire for stability is why they won't just let people change unions because they want to.
We lost that first battle before the N.L.R.B. for reasons I still do not fully understand. I think we had the first O.J. Jury making the call. In one part of the decision, the presiding official cited my testimony as an example of writers having "substantial interchange" with the animators on the shows they wrote, and said we should therefore be in the same union. But my testimony was that I didn't have any contact with the animators in my work because with very rare exceptions, they were all in Korea and didn't speak English. The rest of the ruling made about as much sense.
In any case, I will never forget — or forgive — the following scene. I am sitting in a hearing room of the N.L.R.B. huddling with Writers Guild lawyers who are seeking to get Animation Writers the right to join their union of choice. On the other side of the courtroom, allied against us, are the studios for which we worked — Disney, Hanna-Barbera, etc. — and Local 839. The Business Representative I mentioned above is sitting there, conferring with the folks he's supposed to represent us against, planning with them how to keep us in his union. And why do we think they wanted us in his union? Because he was the guy who was negotiating script fees for us that were below what they wanted to pay…and telling us baldly that our union wasn't going to address our other concerns.
That's why we didn't like Local 839 then. It is much better now. That gent was finally ousted and the current Business Representative is a bright, hard-working guy named Steve Hulett, who has helped remake the union into a vastly better organization. Unlike his predecessor, Hulett sees the advantage of working with the WGA where it can advance the interests of both organizations and he's been out walking the picket lines with us. However, it is still a union that is set up to serve people who animate and paint backgrounds and cels and such. It is still not equipped to do a lot of what the WGA does for its members. It is also part of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and you perhaps have read how openly nasty the President of that union, Thomas Short, has been to the WGA. He hasn't been much nicer to Animation Writers working within 839.
One thing to remember here is that the WGA's organizing efforts in animation are all on a "consent of the governed" basis. To organize any studio still requires an election and in this case, I doubt they would be close elections. Among Animation Writers, there doesn't seem to be much disagreement as to where we belong. I'm not in the thick of it these days but back in the eighties, if we'd been able to have elections and let writers vote as to which union they wanted to have represent them, I'd have bet my house that the WGA would get over 90% in any contest. At some studios, it would easily have been 100%.
This is not just because writers want and deserve residuals, which they expect the WGA to arrange. They do but two things should be noted here. One is my constant reminder to all that some Animation Writers do get residuals even without the WGA. Writing cartoons does not automatically mean No Residuals and that should never be taken as a "given" in any deal.
Secondly, residuals on all cartoon writing would not mean that much more money going to writers; not when you compare it to the over-all budgets of most animated projects. The payments would be important to the writers but the studios' pleas that this would disrupt the financial health of the business and drive profitable shows into deficit…that's all nonsense. They say that every time anyone wants a dollar more for doing anything. The last time it was said to my face over the issue of residuals, it was uttered by an executive who soon after received a boost in his own salary of, I think, four million dollars a year. That was somehow affordable for them but if they'd paid a couple hundred thousand bucks in residuals to writers — and that's all we were talking about — that would have "bankrupted the studio."
No studio has ever been bankrupted by residuals. They only pay residuals when they're selling reruns, which means they're getting paid. The desire to not pay residuals is never anything more than the desire to not share that new income.
Actually, the writers' desire to be repped by the WGA seems to me to flow mainly from what we might call the "moral issues," the desire to do our work protected from abuses that The Animation Guild, because it is not primarily a writers' union, is simply not set up to address. It is no longer a question of 839 being a bad union, as I believe it was in the seventies. It is now merely the wrong union, just as if you were a mailman, a union of textile workers might not be all that effective to cope with your particular needs.
What the WGA is attempting to achieve in its current bargaining with the AMPTP is to just take another step — and maybe not even a very big one — towards getting all those folks in the right union. The studios are opposing it because they don't like the idea of someone being in a union that might be truly effective in saying, "You can't do that to these employees!"
I have no idea how big a bargaining chip all this will be whenever the WGA Negotiators finally get to see the lovely faces of the AMPTP reps again. I would be disappointed but not angry if the WGA dropped its demands in Animation. I would especially not be angry it if were done as a trade-off for something more meaningful elsewhere in the contract. That would slow down the WGA organizing of Animation Writers but it would certainly not stop it. At the moment, I don't see that we're being offered anything in exchange for dropping our demands in Animation. At best, the AMPTP is saying that if we drop that plus some other things that we definitely should not drop, they'll come back to the bargaining table…probably long enough to tell us what else they insist we drop. I'd be disappointed and angry if we fell for that.