Hot Labor Summer Transitions To Cool Labor Fall

It took many more months than it realistically should but Hollywood is slowly getting itself back to work after the end of the WGA strike. In a perfect world, the strike would have lasted less than a month but that’s because it took the studios way too long to realize that the onus was on them to offer a fair contract. That they finally reached an agreement in late September was a true Yom Kippur miracle.

It was a substantial win for the Writers Guild, too. They got wins in the key areas that the studios were holding out in offering a fair agreement in the new three-year minimum basic agreement. It’s a credit to the WGA Negotiating Committee for negotiating as long as it took to get a fair deal for writers. Again, this should have happened much sooner but it took until late September before the studios got serious. They got major wins in AI, staffing rooms, the minimum amount of weeks that writers can be employed, but just as important, there is a change in the residual formula. My best guess is that the AMPTP will make a similar offer to SAG-AFTRA when it comes to residuals. SAG-AFTRA has been asking for an increase of 11% in the first year of the new MBA. A lot of this is because of inflation and how hard it is for the non-A-listers to make a living in their profession.