Writers United?

In America, we tend to think of creative writing as the result of inspiration, genius, or, perhaps, tenacity. We have a hard time thinking of writing as labor and of the people who write as workers. And sometimes it's the writers themselves who have the hardest time thinking that way. After all, we're classy people—even our union isn't a union, it's a "guild." Kind of like the playwrights guild, whose members actually own the copyrights to their work. Only we don't. We traded that for the right to bargain collectively and to form a union. Or, I should say, two unions, West and East, born when the screenwriters out in Hollywood and the TV writers in New York affiliated with each other back in the early 1950s.

Over the years, the makeup of the writers guilds changed. The old studio system collapsed. The TV industry went from live to taped and moved from New York to Hollywood. As a result, almost all TV writers ended up in the Writers Guild of America, West, and many screenwriters, who were no longer warehoused on studio lots, could write from their homes, which could be three thousand miles away from Hollywood in New York City. Screenwriters became members of the Writers Guild of America, East. When the two separate yet affiliated writers unions bargained with the film studios and TV networks, the influence of the TV writers was stronger in the West, while the East was more informed by a feature film mindset. This would seem to suggest a complementary approach in which the whole would be stronger than the two halves when facing off against the employer. Wrong.

The writers unions negotiate minimums—that is, the minimum amount a writer gets paid for writing, say, a half-hour sitcom or a Hollywood feature. The fact is that almost all film screenwriters get paid over scale. More-in-demand screenwriters get paid much more over the scale than less-in-demand writers. Conversely, almost all TV writers get paid the same minimum initial compensation. More-in-demand TV writers also get paid as producers. A producer, according to the writers guilds, is an employer. What a producer gets paid has nothing to do with the writers unions. Thus, the lion's share of a TV writer's salary is not covered by guild jurisdiction. Nor does the employer pay pension or health contributions on this salary, and the TV writer does not pay union dues on it.

There is another key difference between the collective bargaining demands of screenwriters and TV writers. Screenwriters are paid for the reuse of their feature film scripts on TV or home video with a percentage of the sales generated by the studios. TV writers are paid a flat fee for the reuse of the shows they write based on the minimums they were paid initially. Thus, all that TV writers are interested in as far as their remuneration goes is the minimum. However, raising the minimum barely affects the vast majority of screenwriters. Screenwriters are invested in raising the percentage paid when their feature screenplays are repackaged for TV, cable TV, pay-cable TV, and home video. The problem is that, because TV writers are not paid a percentage, they have no interest in this fight. All this, combined with the fact that the average NFL running back probably has a longer career span than the average professional film or TV writer, and you have a shaky negotiating posture.

Every three years, the writers guilds negotiate a Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) with the studios. It's about the size of War and Peace and covers all aspects of employment, from credits to pensions. Leading up to the 2001 MBA negotiations, the writers guilds, led by the West, tried to bluff a tough stance with the studios and networks. The secretary-treasurer of the Writers Guild, West (WGAw) declared to his membership, "Don't buy a new Porsche." "Don't refinance your house."

But the studios called the union's bluff, knowing that the union had done nothing to organize its members for a...