The Writers Guild has reached a tentative (meaning, the membership still has to vote to accept it) deal with the AMPTP. A summary of the terms may be read at this link.
It's late and I have to get to bed…but it seems to me like an acceptable but not great offer. I think the membership will go for it though, of course, there will be those who will feel that after however-many-days-it's-been, the terms should be better. They are not wrong about that but I suspect it's the best deal we're going to get at this time. It does seem better on several points than the Directors Guild deal and one wonders if the DGA has some kind of "favored nations" provision that will upgrade those deal points to match ours.
As rumored, the deal runs through May 1 of 2011. Wonder how they arrived at that date. If the DGA and SAG both renew for three years, that means that in '11, the three unions will all have their contracts expiring in a three month period…and again, we're stuck going first.
Reserving the right to modify my view after the meeting tonight, I feel both pleased and disappointed by this deal. I am pleased the WGA took the stand it did. I believe that if we hadn't struck in November — if we'd caved and accepted the kind of offers they were positioning us for then — we'd have gone a long way towards destroying our livelihoods and those of many others who work in this industry. I'm sure some clown somewhere is going to crunch the numbers wrong and say, "Well, the strike cost Writers an amount totalling X dollars and the gains in the contract only amount to Y over the next three years." But really, this strike was never about that kind of math. It was about a more long range variety that took into account the entire future of our participation in new ways in which the shows and films we write will be marketed. There's no way to calculate the worth of that, and you certainly can't only look at what we will make in the next three years.
The whole battle was also about the way in which we negotiate…or, in most past cases, don't get to negotiate. It all invokes the old analogy of the schoolyard bully who demands a nickel from you one week, a dime from you the next, then a quarter, then fifty cents, etc. At some point, preferably early on, you have to put an end to that because even if at some point your losses seem trivial, they won't stay that way. The AMPTP has an almost inalterable rule: When you accept a bad deal from them, they come back the next time and try and force you to take an even worse one. I shudder to think how terrible the contract would have been in 2011 if we'd taken the kind of thing they were dangling at us last November.
I'm very pleased and proud of the solidarity that the WGA has shown to date. It may get contentious at the meeting tonight because now we can better afford to be contentious. But before the strike I had a lot of dire expectations of members threatening to split the Guild and of far more vituperative attacks on our leadership. With a few exceptions — and only a few — I think this was a very well-run strike. Admittedly, in some cases, the manuevering of the studios did not leave us with a lot of choices…but where we had choices, I think our leadership made the right ones.
Like I said, I'll write more after the meeting. I gotta get some sleep. Good night, Internet!