Candidate for Council, Film/TV/Streaming Sector
Beloved WGAE comrades,
Hi. I’m Greg Iwinski. I hope we’ve met, but if we haven’t I hope my years on council and the NegCom have shown you who I am and what my deal is.
I will always tell you what I believe (even when that’s sometime to my detriment).
So you know that I believe what I’m about to tell you now:
I don’t think you need to vote for me.
Yes. That’s my pitch. Don’t Vote Iwinski.
But there’s a reason. Aaaand maybe a little explanation. Bear with me.
I have served two terms on council and in that time learned so much about our contracts and industry, but more importantly I’ve learned about our members. We are such a kickass union, a collection of weirdos and savants, of superstars and the hidden geniuses that superstars consider superstars. WGA East is full of talent, full of passion, and full of ‘roll up your sleeves’ union power. And it is such a real joy to say that this year our WGAE ballot is full of talent too. I can say without condition, there are more excellent choices than open seats. That is a fantastic place for our union to be in as national power structures grow more and more hostile to labor.
So if not me, why am I on the ballot? Like comedy, it comes down to timing. I got nominated, and when I asked about how many other people had accepted nominations, the number was small. Like, less people than seats small. So it seemed, in that situation, insane to not run and to maybe just leave some space hanging open on our council. Luckily, between that moment and the deadline, a ton of incredible people said yes – people I think you should vote for.
And, at least in this ‘candidate statement,’ I’m going to focus on late night AKA Appendix A writers. (Shout out to our Daytime / Soap / Game Show writers, you write what people watch!)
I believe it’s so important that Appendix A, and late night, are well-represented on council. We fought like hell in the strike, and we won protections that have already benefitted late night streaming writers. [If you’d like to have the “Is Late Night Dying?” conversation I’m happy to meet you at a Manhattan bar to talk about it extensively. Short answer: no.]
WGAE Council, existentially, needs strong late-night and Appendix A representation every single year. This year, there are more worthy candidates than open seats. With that kind of talent pool, I can absolutely say you do not need to vote for me. I will always be involved with the Guild and care so much about protecting late night writers… but anyone afraid to let go of power shouldn’t have it, and elected leadership that doesn’t turn over ends up molding (looking at you, unnamed politicians representing New York state).
So! Let’s talk about some excellent late-night writers to vote for:
Felipe Torres Medina writes for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and is possibly the most exemplary writer of this moment, in a way that’s heroic for us and honestly horrible for him. He’s a Colombian immigrant – and not the fun “safe” kind of NYC immigrant, like an Irish guy in midtown whose family got here before TV was invented. Felipe is a writer who right now is at risk of Trump’s nationalist immigration policies. And he’s also doing his incredibly hard job of writing jokes about the guy who is trying to deport people like him! There are multiple movie-worthy storylines about this administration and Felipe is at the crux of more than one of them. On council, he would be a strong well-informed voice on the threat to freedom of speech and to the risks facing all our WGAE members worried about their immigration status.
Hallie Haglund deserves all our admiration. A former Daily Show writer across the Stewart and Noah eras, Hallie knows late-night. She also has the rare experience of showrunning late night, when she worked with Wyatt Cenac on Problem Areas. That’s why she was on the 2023 Negotiating Committee – and it’s hard to quickly sum up how crucial she was to that fight. The entire Appendix A contingent of that Negotiation Committee was Hallie, Adam Conover, and myself – Hallie is definitely the smartest of the three. (Sorry Adam.) Hallie is thoughtful, patient, and kind. She’s also one of the best people I’ve ever worked with at looking at a complex problem and finding where to start pulling the knots apart. And living in Los Angeles, she’s is seeing wider parts of the industry contraction close-up, while reaching out to our members who live in LA while proudly remaining WGAE.
Ali Barthwell is someone I’ve known since doing comedy back in Chicago at The Second City. From what I understand we are the only two alums of Second City to write late night television, but I did research that with ChatGPT so there may have some factual inaccuracies. Ali fights for what she believes in, no matter who is on the other side and how big or powerful they are. She is a no-BS member of the movement who has a track record of doing the work. And we all know the continuing struggle to make late night rooms look like the audiences that watch them – Ali has lived it, she knows it, and she’s someone you want fighting to fix it. She’s also based in Chicago (like some of our council members in other sectors) so she’s able to bring more valuable perspective of what FTS is like if you don’t live on the coasts, or if you’ve decided to leave NYC/LA during this era of TV.
Devin Delliquanti is a fixture of The Daily Show and I think exemplifies the working late night writer at the heart of WGAE. You know. Glasses, knows a lot about the news, has big opinions on Star Wars and/or Trek, has kids inside a small NYC apartment, wonders if the FBI is gonna send a squad out because they didn’t like a joke. (When you love what you do…) Working in late night through multiple presidents, hosts, and pivots-to-streaming, Devin has deep experience and can help our union find the places to make life for late night writers better. We had plenty of long conversations on the picket lines about the future of the industry and the genre, and I know he will tackle whatever’s coming with a thoughtful and informed approach. TLDR? The guy is solid.
Chris Gethard needs little introduction. He’s a comedy legend, a trailblazer of late night, and someone with endless curiosity. He is not only a fearless comedian who has jumped into new formats as they’ve been invented, he’s also a passionate union guy. He has shown up for our online media members during their hard-fought negotiations, and he was up early for those pre-dawn production pickets in New Jersey during the strike. Chris not only gets what makes the WGA the WGA, but what makes WGA East the East. He has also put together the kind of 2020s workload that is the life of a modern writer – some TV, some podcasting, some stuff on the side the industry doesn’t have a name for yet. I respect the hell out of him and think he would be a phenomenal member of council.
Nicole Conlan is an incredible Daily Show and Late Show writer. She is passionate about making change, and she created an excellent podcast about climate change that is informative and fun without becoming walk-into-the-rapidly-heating-ocean depressing. Nicole has been an involved Guild member pushing for late night writers for years, and she was out on the picket lines when studios tried to roll late night back generations in 2023. As anyone who’s opened our contract knows, our details get complicated quickly, and Nicole is someone who can get into those details and find solutions for our members – some of the most detail-oriented questions I’ve ever gotten have been Nicole questions.
If you didn’t know this group of writers and potential new council members, hopefully this is a start. And really, we’re spoiled for good choices, because there are also a bunch of candidates who’ve already been on council and have done really good work:
AM Homes is someone I’ve voted for every time I’ve had the chance.
Sarah Montana went from picket superstar to a leading council member, and proudly represents Movie Of The Week writers.
Erica Saleh just served a term as FTS Vice President, fought like hell for writers’ rooms in NegCom, and is a cool head in the toughest situations.
Liz Hynes is like if Bernie Sanders was young, and a woman, and also used Letterboxd. One of my closest friends, a Last Week Tonight writer and Late Show alum, and a fighter’s fighter.
So vote. Please vote. We are a union that fights, that wins… let’s be a union that votes with massive turnout. And vote for who you think represents you best. These are my pitches to you – hopefully they mean something. If after all this (1500 words, who’s counting) you still think I’m a good choice, I cannot stop you. Seriously, I looked into it and legally I cannot stop you, that’s election interference and then I’ll be stuffed into a Dominion voting machine (too late to callback?).
It is a rough moment. In the industry. In the country. In our lives. So let’s find some joy in the good news that the WGAE is a union full of talented people ready to serve. Union forever.
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?
We face unprecedented attack in this moment. Unions themselves are existentially threatened, explicitly, by our government. Corporations haven’t had this much power since robber barons were drinking oil milkshakes in bowler hats. And for the first time since our last cultural revolution, the 1960s, the President is using a compliant government to directly affect television programming. One of these would be a crisis; combined they’re simply a potential apocalypse.
In this moment, and in this horrible chapter of history, the most pressing issue facing the Guild is to build — and rebuild — solidarity. In 2023 members of the guild, FTS and also OM/Broadcast, held together with a solidarity that even previous strikes hadn’t seen. And while I wish we had come out of that war into a land of boon and plenty, like a postwar 1950s America, we instead find ourselves back on the brink of another battle. We need solidarity, and to get there we have to listen closely, speak transparently, and hold to our values. One of the most frustrating things in 2025 outside of our industry is watching politicians who are meant to go fight for us get stuck in a loop of campaign talk and concerned tweets and feckless open letters. We cannot be guilty of those same sins as leaders of our union. We have to Talk Normal. We have to admit when things suck and are bad. We have to believe in a consistent fact-based reality and make hard-value judgements based off of it.
There is a segment of our membership who believe that they, younger lower-level writers, have been left behind by their union. I’ll be honest; I don’t know if I’m considered a younger writer or a middle writer or old or what. I’ve been in the Guild 7 years, I’ve only worked in 4 of those, and I’ve never worked above staff writer at any job. So I will talk about “Newer Writers” in the sense of people who came into the Guild on one Peak TV job and haven’t gotten anything since. Writers who came in on a job during the boom of 500 shows a year and an infinite streaming programming budget and watched the job market they were shown as “the norm” get slashed in half. That absolutely can be panic inducing. It sucks on a bone-marrow level that we are in a decade where our industry has been toyed with and vivisected by a bunch of suits who neither understand or care about tv/film, and that now an entire generation of talent is left sitting, waiting, worried they’re going stale, wondering when the hell television is going to make television again. It is a cruel moment in time, inflicted by a group of people who had to be taught “commercials are a good way to make tv profitable.”
But none of the why changes that we have a group who feel left behind. I think there’s a temptation based in good intentions but maybe not effective, where leadership will respond to “I’m a Newer Writer and it’s bad” with “Well it’s bad for everyone right now.” Which is true! We lost 40% of jobs year over year in our last jobs report across all levels of television – no matter where you are on the ladder almost half the jobs disappeared. But that hits different depending on how long you’ve been working. And how many friends you have that might call you for a job. And how much you had in emergency savings. And if you already had a gig that let you buy an apartment. I think sometimes members who have hopped from job to job can forget how absolutely abysmal that gap is between your first and second job. I spent nine months in the pandemic, stuck in a tiny apartment I now couldn’t afford, with my newborn, wondering what I would do now that TV had rejected me.
Newer Writers are the future of Guild leadership and the right-now of Guild membership. We have to make clear they have not been left behind – that we need them in writers’ rooms, that we need them on-set, that we need them to be learning to be the next showrunners. The WGA cannot control how many writing jobs exist — it would be great if the number of jobs was Membership+1 (just in case one person wanted to change it up). But we can fight to expand rooms, to make sure staff writers get their script fees, and to use the network of the Guild to connect Newer Writers with Older Writers who are going to have to staff up their eventual shows. We will not leave them behind. We will not kneecap our future. We will not let number-of-jobs crack our solidarity.
We also have to talk to members about the strike. In the history of labor, and of strikes (even ones with 98% strike votes), there are ripples of buyer’s remorse. I think we need to address that head on, and I think it’s an important place to Talk Normal. Fighting the strike sucked. It was hard and we walked all summer and got trashed in the press and when it was over some of us came back to jobs that weren’t really there anymore. The strike, for me, was financially devastating, because while we were on strike I stepped away from writing my TAG animated show. It wasn’t covered work, but the idea of asking members to give up their jobs while I had a cool technically-allowed-because-of-a-loophole writing gig felt absolutely untenable.
But we won. We made writing jobs better in real tangible ways. And the miserable part, the painful and awful part, is that so few of us have gotten jobs to even experience those wins. Yes, studios went from replacing us with AI to suing AI companies. Yes, writing teams can get healthcare without having to earn twice as much. Yes, the two-man writing staff has been forced to expand. But… 40% of jobs are gone. So I absolutely understand why it feels like a hollow win for people who aren’t working.
So… should we not have won? It seems like a trap question but the options were “fight and win” or “get rolled.” Every single thing the studios gave us in September was on the table on May 1st. They decided it was impossible to say Yes. And then they didn’t. But none of our asks were impossible. And if we caved at the end of April, would 500 shows a year still be on TV? Would those be written by rooms, or by a single showrunner staying on through post, or would it just be an AI? Would production for series with budgets of tens of millions have stayed in the US simply because the writers were cheaper? In a world where we didn’t fight, late night dies for real in May 2023. No one with kids or rent or an apartment can do the job with any kind of security. Soap operas are dead. The concept of a writers’ room would not be in our contract. The concept of being paid more for writing a hit streaming show would not be in the contract.
Counterfactuals are addictive, because they can always paint the history we wish we’d seen. What if Tim Donaghy hadn’t rigged an NBA playoff game so the Phoenix Suns lost to the San Antonio Spurs, and the Suns won a title, and I didn’t have this deep deep hole in my heart? There’s a lot of power and attention in “what if?” — we see an entire industry of experts make money off it after every election day. No one wanted to blow up their 2023 and wear the same t-shirt and memorize a dozen chants — but we all decided to because there wasn’t another choice. That’s solidarity — that’s all of us working together for all of us. It’s similar to this moment in time — no one wants to have to march in the streets for things like “don’t put tanks in our cities” or “water should have flouride,” but we don’t seem to have a choice.
Solidarity. That is our most pressing issue. I do not believe everyone in the WGA needs to agree on everything. But I think we can all agree that it’s bad right now, and we need to help each other, and that help has to go beyond our friend circles and staff lists to the parts of the membership we might not usually go. We are how we get through this. Let’s do it together.
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?
Obviously more and more members work across sectors, and the norm for WGA East may be someone who understands all three. I think that’s important to look at, but I want to focus on the members who are in Broadcast and OM because it’s their passion, and because they’re incredibly good at it. That’s how I feel about what I do, even as I try to break into other things, and I think it’s important to respect their work not just as part of the new writing gumbo, but as its own discipline. Our referendum to create sectors was such a positive moment for our Guild. And I will put my hand up, for those with long memories. The first time I ran for council was on a slate that didn’t want sectors — that was wrong, and so was I. It has been a joy to get to know the members of both sectors, and our council is so much better for it.
Lots of things are obviously changing in both sectors. The President hates the concept of “the news,” and the techbro oligarchs-in-waiting hate the concept of “online news.” So it’s a real nasty combo. In the same way as TV, I don’t know that we can control how many jobs there are, or where those jobs are. But what we can and must do is protect these writers’ skills. They can do things no one else can — talk to a broadcast member who’s at work at 4AM prepping a radio broadcast, or the online reporters who are breaking stories that set an entire day’s news cycle. (I also have to say that all of late night owes a great debt to news writers, because late night needs headlines whether they’re serious or silly.) However news is reported and broadcast, however the mechanics change, we should stand by those writers.
Radio broadcasting may change. Network news may change. Right now, the biggest threat to those seems to be coming from the Oval Office. The WGAE can’t do everything, but we can bug politicians. And a few weeks ago the Democrats of the House Commerce Committee announced they were looking into Paramount and Skydance’s merger, including the seemingly heavy-handed editorial control of 60 Minutes. We face real problems here that should shake us all out of the social media haze of bad news. What happens when a WGAE member is arrested for reporting? How do we protect members asked to lie about the facts on the ground by their corporate leadership? We have to have answers, and we have to be ready.
3. What qualities or characteristics do you look for in a Guild leader?
Well, much has been made of how heavily I’ve endorsed other candidates, so I guess I’ll talk about what kinds of things I see in them that makes me believe they can lead well.
A lot of people think you need to know all about the industry and contracts and The Biz. You don’t. You can learn all that stuff if you care, if you study, if you listen to the people with experience. I did not know the Appendix A contract when I ran for council. I didn’t know about screenwriting steps or how much a movie of the week paid or how the residual rate changes over time. I learned it as I did it. Because you don’t need to know everything — you just need to care about your fellow writers. You need to care about what you believe is right, you need to hold to that moral center, and you need to show up. You need to learn and adapt about specifics and stay ten toes down on values. So that’s what I look for: a moral core. Because otherwise you’ll get sucked into situational ethics, and temptations of convenience, and justifications. Because the council can’t always publicly lay out the details of every deliberation, it’s even more important members know the ethics of the deliberators.
We have a lot of candidates who fit that description, and I think it’s good for the Guild. I would much rather have our council full of informed ideologues who put in the work to hash out solutions than have it filled with gypsum-spined incrementalists. We are a fighting union, and our ballot is full of fighters. We are in good shape.
4. What do you think WGAE’s role should be in the broader labor movement?
I think it’s hard to dictate one’s own role in a movement. A lot of that we cannot control, and I don’t know that it’s important to.
But we need to show up for other unions, particularly ones that our white-collar workplaces and job titles can help provide attention or cover for. We should make sure that we’re part of the entire labor movement, and that other unions know there is no divide in our minds between us and everyone else.
We should listen to the larger strategies happening in labor and lean in where we can be helpful. The 23 strike showed the power of our messaging response — immediate, hard-hitting, well-written. We can be an asset to unions that have other strengths and ask for our help.
We should lead by example. In how we work with and negotiate with our union staff. In how we fight for our least powerful members. In how we put ourselves, as leadership, on the line for the values we believe in.
And we should clearly explain, to our membership and the public, that the fights we are in right now are Guild issues. It is impossible to serve as a union for journalists and stay silent about government control of newsrooms. It is a betrayal of our values if we watch our members’ lose jobs because their show displeases a single politician and we do nothing. That is a core value. If President Pritzker decided Gutfeld couldn’t be on the air anymore and used the FCC to leverage the network… that would be bad! And we would need to say so! Consistency is key, both in what we fight for and how hard we fight. For ourselves, for the industry, for the labor movement… that is the example we need to be.
Endorsements
Sofia Alvarez, JD Amato, Nicole Conlan, Kevin Cortez, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, Sara David, Devin Delliquanti, Glenn Eichler, Gabrielle Fulton, Christopher Gethard, Elizabeth Godvik, Tian Jun Gu, Hallie Haglund, Liz Hynes, Amy Jackson, Barry Julien, Michael Kayne, Mark Kramer, Christopher Kyle, Robert Mittenthal, Taylor Phillips, Andrew Rheingold, Erica Saleh, William Scheft Jr, Aurin Squire, Brian Stack, John Thibodeaux, Felipe Torres Medina, Colleen Werthmann, Alison Zeidman
Endorse Greg Iwinski 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.
