Executive Director’s Report: 2018

Report to Council and Members: May 2018

Is this what a paradigm shift looks like? National policy is being made on Twitter, and high school kids are taking to the streets. The revelations about Harvey Weinstein and many other powerful men have unleashed enormous energy to rethink and remake power relationships in the entertainment industry and across the economy. The Supreme Court is poised to cut the props out from under the labor movement in the public sector, but teachers in “red” states are fired up for action.

Despite the turbulence, the Writers Guild of America, East is in a strong position. This is a time of unprecedented opportunity to craft scripted programming. Although gigs on traditional long-season, network prime time shows remain the gold standard, economically, the creative possibilities offered by cable and SVOD companies have expanded enormously. And SVOD companies – mostly Netflix and Amazon – have leapt into the world of feature films, not only as distributors but also as commissioners of original feature-length projects. The late-night comedy/variety universe has become even more essential to making sense of the world of “politics” (or whatever it is that’s happening inside the Beltway). Our broadcast news members have more than held their own despite the transformation of that industry, and we have organized so aggressively, and so successfully, in digital news that we now represent more than 1000 people who write, edit, and produce video content for digital-native companies.

Talent agents and conflicts of interest

The WGAE and our sister union the Writers Guild of America, West, are the exclusive bargaining representatives of writers employed by signatory studios and networks. That means that talent agents can represent our members only if the Guilds permit it. For many generations, talent agents could represent our members only if they agreed to the terms of something called the Artists’ Manager Basic Agreement (the “AMBA”), which was negotiated by the Guilds and by the Artists’ Managers Guild, which has morphed into the Association of Talent Agents.

The AMBA is a lengthy, detailed agreement that virtually no one has actually read, in part because it was last negotiated in 1976, despite massive changes in the television and movie business (of course, the digital media business didn’t even exist back then), and in the structure and size and role of the talent agencies.

The Guilds negotiate minimum compensation rates, residuals, and other basic terms of employment. It is the agents’ job to negotiate the above-minimum compensation that many members rely on. Despite the enormous profitability of the industry, members’ quotes have been decreasing towards minimums. Perhaps the agents haven’t been doing their jobs. Perhaps that’s because they have no economic incentive to push aggressively for the writer-clients’ interests.

In April 2018, the WGAE Council and the WGAW Board voted to send a notice to terminate the AMBA. Thus, in April 2019, the current AMBA will come to an end. Our notices of termination included a set of proposals to modify the agreement, proposals we believe would be in the best interest of our members. Members can read more about the issues, about the proposals, and about what the Guilds are doing to remake our relationship with the talent agencies on the members-only part of the WGAE website.

Diversity in the industry – sexual harassment and power in the workplace

An entertainment industry whose storytellers do not reflect the diversity of their audiences is difficult to sustain. Writers’ rooms with a more complete range of views and experiences and backgrounds tend to create more compelling shows. The WGAE’s commitment to diversity is fundamental and real and is based in the twin imperatives of social justice and of long-term sustainability.

The stakes became particularly clear when allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke the levee last autumn. He certainly did not invent sexual harassment, and the legal and operational structures intended to prevent and punish that kind of predatory behavior have been in place for decades. I think the powerful surge of outrage and activism demonstrates that these mechanisms, while useful, have failed to address the essential dynamic, which is the profound imbalance of power in the workplace. Sexual harassment is, fundamentally, the sexualized expression of power, and it is imperative that efforts to make workplaces safer include the difficult work of making them more equitable.

In the meantime, of course, the union and its members must be equipped to address incidents of sexual harassment and other sexual misconduct on the job as they arise. Last year we created a resource guide for members and posted it on the union’s website. It describes the legal definitions and potential legal claims related to sexual harassment and identifies additional resources, including employer policies and counseling options. We have also posted a detailed set of power point slides created by the Actors Fund in close coordination with WGAE staff and members from each of our main genres. All WGAE staffers who represent members on a day-to-day basis have received two rounds of training to ensure that we are equipped to respond knowledgably and sensitively to member inquiries. We have crafted a baseline pledge which describes our commitment to members; this was distributed to members are posted on our website earlier this year.

In January and February, we conducted a survey of members’ observations about sexual harassment. (We chose not to use the survey as a means of asking people to report their own incidents of sexual misconduct on the job; our thought was that a survey would not be the most useful or attuned way to have that conversation.) Survey respondents agreed that there are significant barriers to people reporting when they have experienced sexual harassment – fear of career damage, lack of confidence that the employer would take real action, fear of the perpetrator. We asked a series of questions about employer policies and practices, including sexual harassment training. Suffice it to say that respondents did not find employer-sponsored sexual harassment training to be a meaningful approach; many people didn’t even know if their employers offered this training, and many who took the training said it was not helpful.

We wanted to hear from members about continuing work to combat sexual harassment and similar sexual misconduct. Members expressed interest in meetings and other ways to take further action. People had a fairly broad range of views about exactly what form the ongoing work should take, so we will work carefully to put together a variety of programs.

The first round of the Made in NY Writers’ room project wrapped last autumn. Funded by the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the office of Small Business Services, this program offered thirteen fellows the opportunity to deepen their TV writing skills and to learn more about the business from the inside, with a range of panel discussions and presentations and six months of mentorship with New York-based showrunners. Five hundred New York writers had submitted TV pilot scripts, all of which were read twice by WGAE members, who wrote detailed notes on each script. Our goal was to deepen the pool of talented, diverse television writers and to enhance their career opportunities. Feedback from the fellows and their mentors has been enthusiastic.

We came achingly close to winning landmark legislation to incentivize the hiring of women and people of color to write and direct television in New York. The state Senate and Assembly approved a 30% tax credit for diverse hiring, finally putting money at the point of hire. This was made possible by months of intensive mobilization by Guild members and our allies and supporters – which included all of the entertainment unions (especially the Directors Guild of America) and advocacy organizations such as New York Women in Film and Television and even the normally-cautious New York Production Alliance. Our principal sponsors, Marisol Alcantara in the Senate and Marcos Crespo in the Assembly, were stalwart to the end and solid “yes” votes in their chambers towards the end of the regular session. We continued the mobilization to encourage Governor Cuomo to sign the bill into law.

Unfortunately, the Governor vetoed the bill in December, asserting that there was insufficient evidence of discrimination in the television business. This stunned us all, but we have continued to meet with the Governor’s top staff members to try to identify a way to get a real diversity incentive – which would be the first of its kind in the nation – approved and implemented.

Free expression in the current environment

It has been more than a year since the inauguration of a President who scores quick points with his base by slamming the “fake news” crafted by hardworking journalists, including WGAE members. Ironically, the political Right seems to have adopted the complaints of the old Left that “corporate media” cannot be trusted to describe history-in-the-making because of inherent bias. It is a bit counterintuitive to assert that “traditional” news outlets, which are owned by vast corporate conglomerates whose mission is to maximize return to shareholders and top executives, somehow possess an inherently progressive bias – and our members who craft content for broadcast news companies would certainly not accept the “fake news” caricature in their own workplaces. Some observers suggest that current attacks on the journalistic enterprise are designed to challenge the idea that any media voice could be authoritative, implying that any attempt to report on important issues – or criticize the powerful – is inherently slanted and unreliable.

Perhaps social media, which encourage direct first-person participation in the broader conversations, have made news more immediate. In a strange melding of platforms, it turns out that more and more Americans get their news through social media – especially Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

In all, this is not an easy time to write, edit, and produce news content. But the work our members do to investigate, analyze, and present ideas, trends, actions, and risks is more essential than ever.

VICE TV

In September 2017 we won recognition for the television and digital-video content creators at VICE media (we already have a collective bargaining agreement for employees in the digital editorial operation). VICE provides nightly news shows and weekly news/documentary shows to HBO, and it runs the Viceland cable channel, producing many of the channel’s shows in-house. We have just started negotiations covering several hundred writers, producers, editors, and others, including a number of freelance employees hired on a show-by-show basis.

This organizing campaign was notable because it continued the WGAE’s expansion in nonfiction/“reality” television production and in television/online news, and also because we campaigned jointly with the Motion Picture Editors Guild, which now represents the editors, and SAG AFTRA, whose organizing efforts continue. Building productive organization relationships with these sister unions is an important way to increase our collective power in the news and entertainment industries.

Nonfiction television

The WGAE continues to build power in the historically non-union world of nonfiction/“reality” TV. We are in the process of revitalizing the industry-wide network of key activists to increase our campaign for portable health benefits, reasonable pay rates, better safety on the job, scheduling standards, and paid time off.

We have spent an intensive year-plus at the bargaining table with Peacock Productions, a unit of NBU/Universal. With an active bargaining committee of current and former writer-producers, we have faced down an employer that insists it must transition unit employees off of the current company-sponsored package of benefits. With sufficient solidarity and pressure, we hope to get people into the Industry Flex Plan instead – which would provide significant group health and other benefits and would advance the goal of creating a truly portable benefit plan for writer-producers in nonfiction TV.

Multinational media powerhouse ITV continues to battle us fiercely at the bargaining table, adamantly refusing to enter reasonable, industry-standard collective bargaining agreements at its ITV/Kirkstall and Leftfield/Loud companies. In addition to mobilizing support in the bargaining units themselves, we continue to ratchet up pressure externally – most recently by questioning whether a company that disrespects its own employees should get the lucrative production tax credit it seeks from the State of Connecticut. We have enlisted support from a number of Connecticut unions and elected officials, and in March we held a spirited rally at the Stamford offices of A&E, which is one of Leftfield’s biggest customers (and which reaps millions of dollars in Connecticut tax credits itself). Associate Producers at ITV/Kirkstall have complained of rampant discrimination on the basis of their gender and race, and we are working closely with them to fight for real change at the shop.

We have enjoyed powerful solidarity in the struggle at ITV/Leftfield from the UNI Global Union, the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds, and many other unions (including our allies in Connecticut). This is a long, difficult struggle but we are in it for the long haul.

We are returning to the bargaining table for renewal CBAs at both Sharp and Optomen.

A powerful movement in digital news

There isn’t a scientific way to determine when a “campaign” becomes a “movement”, but the wave of unionization in digital news has definitely made the transition. In just two and a half years more than 1000 digital writers, editors, producers, and others have joined with the WGAE to bargain collectively – to make concrete improvements in wages and working conditions and to gain a voice on the job. In just the last 12 months we have won recognition at Thrillist, MTV News, DNA/Gothamist, The Intercept, Vox Media, and Slate, and we have requested recognition on behalf of the editorial and video employees at Onion, Inc.

The power of this movement has been recognized by scholars and labor leaders across the globe. We have been asked to share our observations and insights with researchers and journalists and union activists from the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and Latin America. People are inspired by the combination of bottom-up groundswell and hard-fought organizing work, particularly because the folks who comprise this movement work in the digital economy, and they tend to be younger – “millennial”, even.

The new members and soon-to-be-members recognize the importance of solidarity and activism. At each shop we have large, engaged bargaining committees. At each shop we organize we have active assistance from people in already-organized shops. Gains we make at the bargaining table at one shop translate into energy, enthusiasm, and gains at the next shop.

Even setbacks have not deterred people from joining the movement. The day we won recognition at DNA/Gothamist, its right-wing billionaire owner Joe Rickets announced he was shutting the whole operation down, and he strongly suggested it was precisely because of unionization (although his representatives later said he was losing money and could not figure out a way to stem the losses). With active participation from the rank-and-file bargaining committee, we won good severance terms – but perhaps as important, the whole unit took to social media and urged their colleagues at other digital media companies to keep up the union fight. We had a rally at City Hall Park in Manhattan attended by hundreds of members and leaders from other unions and by a bevy of elected officials, many of whom praised the careful, thorough journalism of the laid-off employees (even those whose work was sometimes critical of those same officials). And the laid-off DNA/Gothamists got right to work alongside WGAE organizers, helping organize the next round of companies. Just in case Plutocrat Joe might have thought his anti-union bloviation might dissuade people from joining our movement for collective bargaining, the WGAE won recognition at Vox, Slate, and Onion, Inc. after he shut down DNA/Gothamist.

We hope to conclude negotiations at Thrillist and The Intercept in coming weeks, and negotiations have started at Vox and Slate.

Broadcast News in the Digital Age

Last autumn we surveyed our members who work in broadcast news. They work for ABC and CBS network news operations and for local television and radio affiliates as regular staffers and as per diems. A wide cross-section of broadcast members participated in the survey, – newswriters, writer-producers, graphic artists, assignment editors, desk assistants, and others. Some are relatively new to their jobs; others have worked more than 20 years. We all know that digital technology is changing the way news is produced, distributed, and consumed, but we wanted to know more about how our broadcast members experience these changes and other pressures from inside and outside the newsroom.

The current political climate is taking a toll on our broadcast members. Although members who took the survey were almost evenly split on the question of whether President Trump’s attacks on journalism had an impact on them (46% said “yes”; 54% said “no”), many wrote comments that suggest the environment has become more difficult. One respondent wrote, “I’ve encountered more people that seem to act aggressively towards journalists or ‘the media’ in general.” Another commented, “Extremely upsetting personally to be attacked in your profession. And I think at times we’re treating things a little too gingerly–trying to equalize sides when in fact at times the balance is off.” And, “It feels like more people are quick to scrutinize how we tell the news than before, even though our decisions are unbiased and fair.”

The survey found, not surprisingly, that broadcast news is not an easy place to work: Two-thirds of the respondents said the 24/7 news cycle creates pressure to be fast, rather than thorough, and fully 60% said they experience burnout on the job. Nearly 73% said the rapid expansion of online news sources and new technologies have created a more demanding pace and expectations. Less than 24% said online news and technology have had an overall positive impact on their workplace. One respondent wrote, “It’s increasingly hard to do a thorough job on stories with small amount of time devoted to issues. 1:30, 1 minute at times to describe political stories.” Another complained of “increased demands, specifically on digital content, while [management is] reducing staff, without lessening existing demands for TV product.”

We asked members to describe the most negative aspects of their jobs – and the most positive. On the negative side, we got comments like:

The constant influx of news is exhausting. The current political climate can sometimes contribute to disrespect of journalists. Not enough time to tell the whole story.

Undervalued by employer. Unreasonable deadlines due to personnel cuts. Unreasonable demands because management doesn’t understand the skill set and technological knowledge needed to complete the job well.

The constant pressure. The increased number of jobs we’re expected to perform flawlessly. The lack of appreciation for the work performed.

But members also had some good things to say about their jobs:

The people I work with, the fact that it is a union job, getting to write every day.

The work itself. The WGA health benefits. The fact that people get paid for overtime.

It’s a huge platform, well resourced (comparatively) and competitive. Great work environment, hard hitting News, free bagels on Friday.

Beginning in February 2018 we presented a five-session digital skills course for members who work in news, taught by Jeremy Caplan of CUNY. Members learned strategies and skills to ensure that their story-telling works in the digital world. The course was funded by the Consortium for Worker Education.

We will begin contract negotiations at ABC News and CBS News in late 2018 and early 2019.

Screenwriting in the Digital Age

In November we convened a roundtable of working screenwriters to discuss the growing prominence of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix and Amazon in the feature film world. SVOD companies are no longer just an ancillary market for post-theatrical distribution; increasingly these entities enter the market at the point of initial distribution, and they commission original projects. James Schamus and Ira Deutchman shared their insights into the transformation of the business and members described their experiences with all-rights deals, surprisingly robust production budgets, and surprising new aspirants (e.g., Disney, which appears to be betting heavily on its own SVOD operation in coming years). We hope to convene more roundtable conversations on the new world of screenwriting – perhaps including a discussion of whether the distinction between “series” and “features” continues to have meaning in the digital world.

 Speaking of the Movement

The WGAE works within the context of a broader, global labor movement. We are part of the AFL-CIO, affiliated through the federation’s Department for Professional Employees, together with our sister entertainment unions like SAG AFTRA and IATSE. We are also part of the International Affiliation of Writers Guilds, which comprises twelve film and TV writer organizations across the global. And we are part of UNI Global Union, whose 900 affiliates represent twenty million working people on all five continents.

These affiliations are essential as a matter of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the battle for empowerment and economic justice, but they also bring more immediate benefits. As described elsewhere, UNI Global Union and the IAWG have stood strongly with us in our ongoing battles with ITV/Leftfield – joined more recently by a number of unions in Connecticut. We have spread the word about organizing and the effective use of social media and about the importance of engaging members in meaningful ways at the DPE, at the quadrennial convention of the AFL CIO in October 2017, at the executive committee of UNI in Switzerland the same month, and at the IAWG’s annual meeting.

Lowell Peterson