Strike progress may still be too little, too late
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Despite progress in negotiations between film and TV writers and major studios that dragged late into Sunday night, it may have come to little too late to avert a strike today.
Negotiators for the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers spent more than ten hours in talks at a undisclosed hotel in Hollywood in a last-ditch effort to avert what would be the writers’ first strike in nearly two decades. Talks were still underway as of 9:40 p.m.
Sunday’s negotiations marked the most substantial since the parties began protracted talks this summer, raising a glimmer of hope that a deal might be within reach.
However, as of late Sunday night the guild’s board had not convened to reverse its earlier unanimous vote to authorize a nationwide walkout set to begin at 12:01 am.
As far as the Guild’s Eastern division was concerned, the strike has already begun, according to an e-mail to its members.
‘As of midnight, the STRIKE IS ON in the Eastern time zone. WGAE members should report for picketing at Rockefeller Plaza tomorrow starting at 9:00am. The members of the WGA Negotiating Committee and the AMPTP continue to engage in discussions. We will keep you updated on any new developments.’
And on the West Coast, even as negotiators were hunkered down behind closed doors, strike captains were sending e-mail notices to guild members and guild directors, informing them where to show today on the picket lines.
Earlier in the day, writers at the guild’s West Coast headquarters in the Fairfax district had loaded their picket signs onto trucks. The union had organized a network of 300 strike captains that were ready to stage daily pickets at all the major studios, including Disney and Warner Bros. as well as CBS TV City and NBC Burbank.
Guild members were asked to sign up for a shift beginning at 9 a.m. or 1 p.m., when they would be given signs, slogans to chant and red T-shirts emblazoned with ‘United We Stand’ as they arrived on site, captains said. The guild’s East Coast office had planned to dispatch picketers to NBC’s headquarters at Rockefeller Center in its first wave of protests.
After three months of contentious negotiations, talks broke down Wednesday night when the writers’ three-year contract expired amid disputes over DVD residuals and payments for shows distributed over the Internet.
Though a new agreement remains far off, last-ditch, back-channel efforts by some of the industry’s top writers and corporate chief executives appeared to break a logjam that had stopped the sides from starting the negotiations in earnest.
The apparent headway came amid outside pressure from such respected writers as “ER” creator John Wells, a former guild president, and “Desperate Housewives” executive producer Marc Cherry, and media chiefs News Corp. President Peter Chernin, Warner Bros. Entertaiment Chairman Barry Meyer and Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger.
A federal mediator who was brought in last week had urged both sides to come back to the table Sunday.
Richard Verrier