Features » December 12, 2007

Lights! Camera! Collective Action! (cont’d)

“The IATSE conflict is more serious than a minor irritant,” Hermanson says. “We would have won ‘Top Model’ if there had been no conflict, and if we had their cooperation, organizing in reality TV would be fairly easy.”

The two unions also clash about representing workers in animated films. Nearly a decade ago, the Guild won recognition for Fox Network animation writers, who saw their work as more like writing for television series than for traditional cartoons. While IATSE represents many animators for TV and short cartoons, in the film business, most writers for animated features are Guild members but not covered by the contract (and thus get no residuals from hits like Shrek).

Now, the Guild is demanding that employers recognize reality shows’ story producers as under its jurisdiction. IATSE would still organize editors. And the Guild wants employers to acknowledge contractually that they will be able to represent any animation writers not under other contracts, such as those with IATSE. The Guild also wants the studios to remain neutral during organizing and recognize the union when a majority of workers sign membership cards.

The conflict stemming from jurisdictional disputes has only intensified after IATSE criticized the Guild’s bargaining strategy and its decision to strike, which has led studios to lay off some IATSE members.

The squabbling complicates a key Guild strategy to use the strike to strengthen its organizing. “At the heart of this struggle [with the producers] is the question of jurisdiction,” Hermanson says, “whether we as the Writers Guild will have jurisdiction over writing for new media, re-use on new media and other areas of non-union television. The industry employers have used every technological innovation and new genre to exclude us, and we’re not going to be excluded going forward.”

The bigger they are…

The Guild’s attempts to organize writers and protect their income streams also clash with the growing concentration of power in the hands of the Big Six media giants: General Electric (NBC), Time Warner, Walt Disney (ABC), News Corporation (Fox), CBS and Viacom. Most have diversified holdings in network, cable TV, film, publishing, Internet operations and more. That gives them the financial strength to withstand even effective strikes in one profit center. It also means that they are positioned to profit from any technology and potential business strategy.

Beyond the threat from unauthorized film file-sharing, the Internet poses two possible challenges to their dominance. First, immensely wealthy Silicon Valley companies, like Google, could decide to move beyond making billions by connecting content, advertising and viewers to providing their own content, though this is unlikely in the near future.

Second, the theoretical possibility exists for what Institute for the Future Director Paul Saffo calls “the Cambrian explosion of cyberspace”–a radical transformation of media by diffuse innovation from below–especially if the United States ever makes much higher-speed Internet access widely available. If that occurred, creative writers, actors and directors now fighting the Big Six could have more options to work independently or cooperatively, or their talents could become even more valuable to any media company trying to distinguish itself from amateurs.

Federal deregulation over the past two decades not only encouraged today’s media concentration, it also wiped out much of independent film and television production, creating, in the words of longtime independent producer and Guild member Leonard Hill, “a unified monolith that is disabling and crushing labor.” Hill argues, “This new management team includes corporate raiders who feel no allegiance to the creative process. At the end of the day, the studios wanted this strike.”

Despite their consolidated power, the Big Six own different portfolios of media enterprises and thus have different stakes in the entertainment future, leading some observers to argue that it is hard for the industry to agree on strategy–except to take as much away from workers as possible.

The concentration of power is matched by a concentration of income. The entertainment industry is a prime example of what economist Robert H. Frank calls the winner-take-all phenomenon. A few select movie stars and directors can negotiate gross participation deals that guarantee them a share of all income from their films, making them tens of millions of dollars for each film. But the winners who capture an outsize portion of the revenue also include media executives, like CBS’s Moonves with his $28.6 million paycheck for 2006, or ousted Viacom CEO Tom Freston, who departed with a $60 million severance package.

Producers had initially proposed rolling back residual payments, making writers more like straightforward wage workers. Since the birth of the talkies, producers have looked down on writers, and fought both unions and residual payments. Legendary film mogul Lew Wasserman reputedly dismissed residuals with the comment, “I don’t pay my plumber every time I flush my toilet.” But, as writers note, his toilet didn’t generate a flood of money each time he flushed.

The strike must go on

Writers insist that their creativity is the basis of the industry’s wealth, and that they deserve to share it. They argue that residuals help even out the feast-or-famine pattern for film and television writers, nearly half of whom are unemployed at any time. They say that a film is a collective creative product, not just the work of one star director or actor, and certainly not of one corporate tycoon. Therefore, everyone should share in the winnings, including the technical workers whose residuals fund health and pension funds.

Not every entertainment industry worker shares equally or has the same economic stake. Within the Writers Guild, TV show runners–the people who manage day-to-day operations–are both writers and producers, torn by divided loyalties and separated from other writers by million-dollar incomes, yet still generally sympathetic to the strike. Even bigger gaps exist within the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). And the Directors Guild is divided between the directors and the assistant directors, as well as the unit production managers, who often identify more with the producers than with the creative talent.

Overall, there are 14 arts and entertainment unions, which are often at odds with each other as well as internally fractious. The AFL-CIO has begun the arduous task of bringing them together in an Industry Coordinating Council, and some unions have discussed mergers. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and SAG recently fell just a few votes short in their long-standing efforts to merge, but now are squabbling about bargaining procedures in anticipation of their June 30 contract expiration.

“The good news is, the [arts and entertainment] industry is growing and there are opportunities for union growth both within companies where there’s a union presence, in geographic markets where there’s a union presence and in new markets with little penetration,” Grabelsky says. “The bad news is, it’s hard to get all these unions in the same room to talk about it.”

With new, more militant leadership elected after a rebellion during contract negotiations three years ago, the Writers Guild worked hard this past year to educate and organize its members. The striking writer Friesen, previously not much involved in the Guild, has become a regular picketer and volunteer.

“They’ve gone to pretty significant lengths to let members know what’s happening, and they’ve got strike captains [who contact members],” he says. “I’m never in the dark.” The Guild also reached out to other entertainment unions, forming a close relationship with SAG in particular (but also winning support from Teamsters, some of whom refused to cross the Guild picket lines).

Many observers thought that the Writers Guild would likely wait to strike, when it might be joined by SAG. Such an effort could have shut down production more quickly. “If we’d waited,” Hermanson says, “we’d have faced an industry with a stockpile of feature films. Now we caught them without a stockpile,” and in the middle of a television season, which started in early fall.

The strike proved surprisingly effective, hitting the industry more widely and quickly than expected, since the studios had not yet built up their inventory. Yet if the Guild cannot settle early, the industry may try to negotiate a deal more favorable to the industry with the Directors Guild, hoping to undercut the other unions.

But SAG National Executive Director Doug Allen says that an early deal will not necessarily establish a pattern. “If it’s a fair deal, we’ll be interested in building on it,” he says. “If not, we won’t be bound by anything someone else does.”

He says thousands of SAG members joined the Guild’s picket lines and attended rallies in support. They also held joint informational discussions among actors, writers and directors on production sets. “One of the reasons there is a lot of solidarity,” Allen says, “is because the Writers Guild and SAG have worked for more than a year exchanging information and educating our members.”

The hard preparatory work may not have welded a seamless solidarity among entertainment unions, but it certainly has strengthened the writers in their effort to stay on top of developing technology and effectively organize more writers for a bigger share of what they help to create. Even facing a phalanx of powerful, rich, diversified conglomerates, it looks like they have what it takes to win.

They Wrong. We Write. Indeed.