Writers Guild Members Aren’t on the Same Page

Sometime in the next few months, the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, are likely to be engaged in an arbitration. The matter at hand is money. The West claims the East owes it a bundle in “misdirected” dues that have somehow not been paid for 30 years. The East says it’s not so. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the WGA-E council.)

There has always been a certain amount of tension between the two guilds. Both sprang from the Screen Writers Guild, which was created in 1921, but the New York-based eastern branch was established in 1954 to represent television writers, who at the time were mostly based in New York.

The two organizations are bound together in an affiliation agreement -- the Mississippi River is the physical dividing line -- but the West today has twice the number of members we do and resents what limited power we have to get in its way. The West accuses us of shiftiness and low cunning.

We think they’re trying to grab our dues and poach our membership. We also fear their leadership is too conciliatory to the companies, too afraid of their power and predatory nature, too fearful of being seen as the bad guys of the industry. They underestimate the cowardice and cupidity of large corporations, let alone their greed. Still, we have worked well together on credit and residual matters, among others, and when it came time in the past to take on the studios and networks and negotiate a contract, we were usually together.

Now, sadly, the tension seems to have escalated into a war brought on, we feel, by the West. The two guilds have recently, if reluctantly, agreed to a contract with the companies in which we settled for nothing except additional money for our health fund. None of our major demands were met. The derisory amount writers get from the vast sums from DVD sales remained unchanged.

Many of us in the East and some in the West thought we could have gotten more if we had been smarter and fought harder. It’s true that the companies were brutally adamant. But nothing that the guilds have gotten in the past, from health insurance to pensions to simple respect, has been achieved without a fight. Certainly, if the writers had been joined by the actors and the directors, we all would have gotten a better deal. But because we wouldn’t hang together, we got hung out to dry separately.

A war between the guilds is not the one we should be fighting. It is a war against the wrong enemy.

There are real differences between the two guilds. Some are the result of geography. Los Angeles is a company town. New York is not. Writers in the West are more tightly bound to the industry; there is often no distinction between the social and the business life. It can make for a different sensibility.

We are also a member of the AFL-CIO and they are not, and this can lead to differences on what constitutes a union, how you fight and for what.

These days, we share relatively equal numbers of TV and movie writers, but we have more news writers. Neither of us feels superior to the other, only impatient sometimes, and now hostile. We are all writers in the same boat.

It matters who wins this arbitration. The West badly needs the money, and it will take a sizable chunk out of the East’s budget. But its greater and more ominous meaning is that, at a time when all our communal energy should be directed to the business of how to fight the companies for what we deserve, how to plan a mutual strategy, how to inform and rally the membership, one union is more interested in fighting and even taking over the other.

The guilds’ only reason for existing is to serve and protect writers. They fail their responsibility, their reason for being, when they fight each other. The true enemy wins. The writers lose.