Candidate for Council, Film/TV/Streaming Sector
Serving in WGAE leadership means you get to see behind the curtain. Most end up closing it behind them or looking away—few ever wonder why there’s even a curtain at all.
When I served on Council from 2021–2023, the excuses for our union’s opaque inner workings eventually became clear. But the first telltale signs came from a notion I heard again and again from our union officials:
The Writers Guild is both a union and a guild.
On the surface, it seems accurate. As a union, we collectively bargain with our employers over the use and value of our labor. As a guild, we seek to protect and control our craft.
Over time, however, the real meaning of this sentiment became clear. It wasn’t describing two strengths—it was justifying why we’ve struggled to fulfill either.
Being both a union and a guild could work to our advantage. If treated as complementary, their best elements could build on each other. But instead, our leadership pits them against each other in a perpetual tug-of-war between the collective power of a union and the individual mastery of a guild.
This false dichotomy is a trap. It locks us into an identity defined by endless internal opposition that our leaders can then claim to resolve through top-down governance and secrecy. The incentives built into their positions push leadership toward doing this—preserving the status quo—so they create a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces their actions.
Leadership likes to call the WGAE “member-led,” but in practice that just means our leaders are members—not that the whole of membership is leading our union.
The structure of leadership is split between the elected Council and the unelected staff.
Staff hold most of the operational power, presenting themselves as impartial arbiters while privately making decisions or offering Council and membership narrow, pre-selected “choices” that fit their playbook—even on important surveys.
Council meets monthly, often rubber-stamping staff proposals. But real authority rests with the Executive Committee, which makes most decisions in advance, leaving other Councilmembers with little to no meaningful role.
For the unelected paid staff, this arrangement secures their careers, benefits, and influence—the more they control operations, manage optics, and suppress dissent, the safer their positions are.
The issue is that even well-meaning staff can unintentionally undermine the union’s potential when given too much unchecked power. The very things we strike for—higher wages, better benefits, stronger contracts—also incentivize staff to centralize control and keep members disciplined and out of the loop.
Elected unpaid Councilmembers have parallel incentives. The role offers influence, visibility, and valuable connections in an industry where such resources are hot commodities.
The relationships they build with top members create an elite tier of influence that benefits both sides—top members get what they want, Councilmembers secure reelection, and the cycle repeats. Few rock the boat because those who do risk being thrown overboard.
This leadership dynamic keeps the union-guild binary in place, treating the organization as a precious relic whose current form must be preserved for “stability.” Yet technological shifts and emerging genres—streaming, AI, reality TV—continue to demand an adaptability we lack, revealing just how fragile that stability is.
In reality, the binary of union vs. guild is a rhetorical shield used by leadership.
It’s a way to avoid the member-driven structural changes our growing struggles demand, while appearing to uphold tradition.
Our union’s strength depends on continually building negotiating power through a broad, organized membership who can strike effectively.
Our guild’s strength should come from maintaining professional standards that allow the evolving craft to flourish.
But instead of fostering mastery through collective strength and artistic freedom, leadership enforces conformity, suppresses dissent, and narrows who “belongs.”
The result is that our prestige is gilded: superficially impressive, but masking how much power we’ve actually lost.
For guild leadership, the show must go on to preserve their legitimacy.
For rank-and-file union members, it’s a completely different story.
A guild might safeguard craft standards, but without a strong, organized union beneath it, those standards become tools of control rather than collective advancement.
To meet the mounting challenges the WGA faces—both inside our own union walls and in the industry at large—we must build real power. And that can only come from organizing. But not just any organizing: how we organize is just as important as whether we organize at all.
Organizing must start internally, with a healthy democracy rooted in transparency, open debate, and genuine deliberation. Members must be fully informed and empowered to shape the path forward—including how we organize externally across the industry.
That starts with basics our guild has avoided: open meeting minutes, roll-call votes, and a member-ratified organizing plan that sets collective goals and gives us the tools to measure progress ourselves, not just take leadership’s word for it.
A member-driven union is essential to our survival. This will allow for true reciprocal solidarity, where we can materially strike for one another as union members, not just as superficial supporters.
“Member-driven” doesn’t mean a referendum on every decision; it means members set priorities, define goals, and hold leadership accountable for executing them. That’s the only way internal democracy translates into credible, outward-facing organizing.
Right now, the capacity for internal organizing is stifled. Leadership suppresses dissent and controls the narrative to avoid any appearance of contention, even though democracy is inherently contentious.
Avoiding difficult debates doesn’t protect the union—it weakens it. If we don’t address our divisions openly and collectively, we’ll continue replicating the same elitism and tiered favoritism that got us here in the first place—divided, brittle, and unprepared for the fights ahead.
The writing is on the wall for how the WGA is preparing to clamp down even further on members’ free speech rights.
As I wrote in my last statement, the guild is ramping up its suppression of dissent to maintain their top-down control. Over the past year, we’ve seen excessive, arbitrary, and unfair treatment of various members. I’m not excusing the performing of disallowed work during a strike—but the guild must also look in the mirror. Its own structures have helped create the very conditions it now seeks to punish.
That’s why public gestures like signing open letters defending free speech ring hollow—our own unresolved free speech crisis undercuts any moral authority we claim in the industry.
Even the question of what counts as “writing” is kept behind closed doors. The recent reports of prominent writers struggling to define the boundaries of writing remind us how subjective—and political—those definitions can be.
If such debates exist at the highest levels of our craft, why aren’t we having them as members? Instead, leadership defines those boundaries in private, deciding who “belongs” without the open, democratic debate we deserve.
The fight over reality TV and nonfiction shows what happens when organizing is driven from the top down.
In the 2007 MBA negotiations, the WGA demanded codified coverage of reality TV and animation. What’s less known is that certain “prestige” corners of nonfiction, reality, and animation already had, and still have, MBA coverage—usually when influential members lobby leadership for their own shows. This wasn’t a jurisdictional dispute over whether the MBA could cover the genres; it was a political choice that historically rewarded connections over collective power.
In the lead-up to the 2007 talks, reality and animation were incorporated into negotiations because they were a ready-made strikebreaking pool of programming that studios could use to blunt our leverage.
But because the majority of writers in those genres weren’t covered, leadership treated them as expendable. They ultimately used reality and animation as bargaining chips to secure a foothold in streaming, then abandoned the issue once negotiations ended.
The reason was clear: winning broad coverage in those genres would have required member-driven organizing, not top-down control.
Since then, leadership has turned to staff-driven organizing at boutique nonfiction production companies—securing siloed CBAs that keep nonfiction and reality workers divided from the rest of the membership. These agreements often lump writers with non-writers into the same contract. It’s easier for staff to target an entire shop and present it as a “win,” but the result is fragmented contracts that score points for leadership while weakening our collective strike power.
Organizing all workers across the entire industry is crucial, but only if it’s member-driven and directed toward building the strike power we all need.
Staff-driven organizing suffers from the same flaws as our internal governance—campaigns are shaped to avoid risk, control the message, and protect leadership’s stability. It favors organizing for optics over organizing for power. The cost is that our union never builds the cohesive, MBA-anchored strength to win what we need and deserve from the studios.
When I was on Council, I pushed to integrate the writers of all film and television genres onto the MBA. Leadership not only refused—they removed me from communication channels, threatened me privately, and excommunicated me from internal circles.
Their justification—that the MBA is for scripted writers—remains false and internally contradictory. The guild is fully aware that nonfiction writers also produce literary material, including scripts, and that existing nonfiction programs are covered under the MBA.
Like the union vs. guild divide, “scripted vs. unscripted” is another false binary, but a bit more indecipherable. “Unscripted” is meaningless outside seemingly fully improvised productions. Yet it’s used to gatekeep writers and exclude them from the debate about their very own profession, exactly the kind of top-down contradiction that only a member-driven union can overcome.
Whether it’s reality TV, animation, YouTube, or formats we haven’t yet imagined, our union won’t be fully up to the task until we evolve how we organize.
Every few years, it’s déjà vu all over again when there’s a rush to announce new “organizing” that will be completely staff-driven. This doesn’t mean new organizing should be opposed, but it must be understood as part of a broader member-driven strategy.
Staff can still play a role, but members must set priorities, define goals, and hold leadership accountable—or the process will remain disconnected from the very power it relies on: us.
Last year, I launched the Writers Guild Autonomous Rank-and-file Caucus (WGARC) to rebuild that foundation—a platform for members on both coasts to confront structural issues, organize internally, and restore transparency, accountability, and democratic control to our union.
I would be grateful for your vote so I can keep fighting for these changes on Council.
I’m running to help our union be the strongest foundation for our guild that it can be—through member control, reciprocal solidarity, and uniting our writers under one contract that brings our craft together rather than tearing it apart.
A foundation strong enough to pull back the curtain once and for all.
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Keep in touch through the resources below:
WGARC:
- Writers Guild members can sign up for the WGARC here.
WGAE Council Campaign:
- Stay connected and up to date with my Council campaign here.
Responses to Candidate Questions
1. What do you think is the most pressing issue facing the Guild and what steps will you take to address it?
The most pressing issue facing the WGA is leadership itself and the top-down, staff-driven structure that reproduces unaccountability. Council decisions are opaque, undemocratic, and hidden from members. Officials treat the union as something separate from—even above—the membership. Rather than taking responsibility, they blame low election turnout on members, ignoring the lack of transparency that prevents members from understanding how the Guild operates in order to participate meaningfully.
To fix this, we must transform the WGA into a member-driven union with democratic processes, transparency, and oversight. That’s why I formed the Writers Guild Autonomous Rank-and-file Caucus (WGARC)—to organize independently and build the accountability our union desperately needs.
2. WGAE is divided into three sectors: Film, Television, and Streaming; Broadcast, Cable, and Streaming News, and; Online Media. How will you work with and represent all Guild members, including those outside of your own work sector?
The key is to focus on what unites us rather than what divides us. Too often, leadership and staff heighten differences to weaken solidarity and maintain top-down control. With democratic and transparent procedures and real rank-and-file accountability over our leaders, members can ensure common ground is reached and solidarity is built. We must work collectively, not in isolated silos, and I will push for structural changes that strengthen our union, empower members, and build unity across all three sectors.
3. What qualities or characteristics do you look for in a Guild leader?
Independence, accountability, and critical thinking. A leader should be independent from entrenched officials, accountable to members rather than staff or the status quo, and willing to think critically about how our union actually functions. That’s the standard I hold myself to, and what I believe every Guild leader must embody.
4. What do you think WGAE’s role should be in the broader labor movement?
The “labor movement” cannot be reduced to a vague slogan or a banner raised above workers. It must emerge from workers themselves—not from staff, officials, or bureaucratic structures. The WGAE’s role should be to equip members with the tools and space to organize independently, building real power from below. Our task is to foster reciprocal solidarity with other workers and contribute to a broader movement forged through rank-and-file organizing—not declared from above.
Endorsements
Benjamin Trueheart
Endorse Benjamin Rosenblum for Council, Film/TV/Streaming Sector
Note: WGAW members who wish to endorse a candidate may follow the process outlined in section G.1.B of the 2025 Election Policy.
