Members of the Writers Guild of America met at the Sheraton Universal Hotel on Wednesday night to hear from union leadership about priorities for upcoming studio talks.
On their way in, they passed by picketing WGA West staffers who have their own issues and who have threatened to go on strike ahead of bargaining.
“It is management’s fault that we are having to do this right now,” said Dylan Holmes, a WGA attorney who co-chairs the staff union’s bargaining committee. “From the very jump, I think that we have been dealing with a management that wants to circle the wagon and protect their own.”
The WGA is due to sit down with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on March 16, with a May 1 deadline to reach a new contract. The staff union, which organized under the auspices of the Pacific Northwest Staff Union last spring, voted Jan. 29 to authorize a strike.
WGA leadership has said that AMPTP negotiations will go on as scheduled if the staff is on strike, and that key tasks are handled by managers who are not part of the bargaining unit. Asked for comment in response to the picket, a WGA spokesperson referred to the guild’s earlier comments.
Ellen Stutzman, the WGA West executive director, is leading the talks with the staffers. As of now, there are no further bargaining dates scheduled.
Speaking outside the Sheraton Universal, WGA staffer Shelly Guzman said that the employees sought to organize due to disparate treatment.
“It no longer seemed like a place that I loved coming to simply because a policy or a directive can change based on that particular supervisor’s mood,” said Guzman, who works as an agency coordinator. “There needs to be uniform parity — a base where everyone is treated the same. It’s just not fair. There’s not an evenness that there should be in a workplace.”
The staff union has pushed for “just cause” and progressive steps for employee discipline.
It has also objected to low pay, saying that 64% of the membership makes less than $84,850 a year. For some, a WGA job can be a stepping stone to a career in the labor relations department of one of the major studios. But others are committed to the mission of labor, and are frustrated at the lack of a seniority-based pay scale.
“We don’t want to be some crappy starting-off point so that you can get a job at Sony,” Holmes said. “WGA pays staff abysmal rates. Eventually they realize, ‘I can be doing the same thing, working not as hard for twice the money at Sony.’ That is a huge problem for turnover, for staff morale.”
The staff union has also accused the WGA of breaking labor law. The staff union filed an unfair labor practices complaint last summer over the termination of Fátima Murrieta, a member of the organizing committee. Since then, two more staffers who supported the union have been let go.
Negotiations on the first contract began in September, and have gone on intermittently since then. The staff union has accused WGA management of “surface bargaining” and of bargaining in bad faith.
The WGA published a side-by-side comparison of the two sides’ bargaining positions last month, showing that on some issues they are not that far apart. The WGA has offered a minimum salary of $55,000 a year — up from $43,000 — while the staff union has pushed for $59,737.
The staff union then published its own comparison chart, highlighting vast differences on issues like seniority protections and discipline.
Holmes said that they never expected talks to drag into the AMPTP negotiation window.
“We would have never guessed that we would be so far apart that it felt like we were speaking different languages,” he said.
At the picket, a couple dozen WGA staffers handed out fliers to TV and film writers as they drove into the hotel parking lot.
“Our life’s work is to improve working conditions for writers, yet many of us struggle to pay rent and work in fear of retaliation in the workplace without just cause protections,” the flier stated.
Holmes said the WGA statement in response to the strike authorization showed a “lack of respect for the work we do.”
“They are convinced that if we do go on strike, they can go it alone,” he said. “We feel like they have essentially given up on having a dialogue with us, and have decided instead to do what any multinational corporation or any large hospital chain would do in a situation where they’re facing a strike. And that is shut out the union members and make a web page that is full of mischaracterizations and paints their own staff as essentially irrational.
“This is a tactic that’s employed by Kaiser,” he continued. “This is a tactic that’s employed by Starbucks. And it is disheartening to say the least that labor leaders are choosing to take that route.”
