It’s Over . . . Almost
By Kathleen Bolton | February 11, 2008 |
The WGA strike, that is. Via Nikki Finke:
SUNDAY 12:30 PM: At the WGA’s news conference today, union leaders declared the new contract is “a huge victory for us”. Trumpeted WGAW President Patric Verrone, “This is the first time we actually got a better deal in a new media than previously.” Verrone credited News Corp. No. 2 Peter Chernin and Disney chief Bob Iger, and also CBS boss Les Moonves, with “being instrumental in making this deal happen” after the WGA spent 3 months “getting nowhere” with the AMPTP negotiators and lawyers. WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman added that, “What happened to the Golden Globes was instrumental in getting the CEOs to this table. It was a huge symbol.” Bowman said it was “imperative” that the WGA “get in on the ground floor of New Media. Henceforth, we’re in from the start. It’s 2% of distributor’s gross. They can’t have a business model without taking that into account.”
Great news on all fronts.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
Glad we can get back to business now. I hope in the future individual writers can aggressively negotiate their own contracts instead of waiting every 20+ years for the WGA to do it for them.
I’ve always felt this is an individual thing, between the writers, their agents, lawyers, and the studios. I never understood why it had to be a collective kicking-of-nuts to the entire industry and its fan base.
Either way, I’m glad its almost over and I hope it can be handled more professionally in the future.
The problem with negotiating individual contracts is that most individual writers have very little clout.
Elena, that’s the Chicken Little argument. I see this argument made a lot in the game industry, usually by people who feel underpaid.
Yet there may be others on their team who make twice what they do, not because they have some kind magical clout, but because they are decent negotiators.
And where they aren’t, they have agents or headhunters to negotiate for them.
Most in the game industry see little need for a union exactly because they recognize their own freedom to negotiate things like salary, royalty (where available). In other words, we enjoy the free (job) market and milk the most of it where we can. There is little place for a WGA or something like it.
Considering the nature of the creative work and the kinds of salaries involved, TV writing doesn’t seem that far away a lifestyle from game development.
I think it’s worth considering that it might be part of WGA agenda for writers to NOT negotiate their own contracts — for very obvious reasons because then writers simply wouldn’t need the WGA.
Which is exactly what I’m arguing. :)
The WGA has their own agenda just like any other organization. Similarity to a network? Their power lay in writers being subservient to them. Without writers, the WGA would be a powerless entity. “Who benefits?” — the ultimate question, something to think about.
What the strike has proven to me is not that writers have power, but that the guild does. Which I already knew, and doesn’t really help the writers all that much in the long run.
This was a masterful political showdown orchestrated by the WGA to demonstrate the power of the organization. It’s hard for me to see it as anything other than that, despite the heartfelt crusading in the name of every writer on the planet, not without humor, even those that don’t belong to the WGA! :)
$2500 WGA membership x the number of new memberships bought by the attention of this strike = More Powerful WGA.
Who gets more out of this, the WGA or the writers? I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty easy for me to answer.