Yahoo News WGA East Leaders Break Down Guild’s ‘Risky and Unusual’ Effort to Honor SAG-AFTRA Picket Lines: ‘We Have to Keep Supporting Each Other’
The strike is over, but the fight is not yet won.
On Wednesday, as the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike formally ended after 148 days, Variety spoke with newly elected WGA East president Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and WGA East executive director Lowell Peterson about the end of the work stoppage at the East coast guild’s membership meeting to discuss their tentative three-year MBA agreement with the Hollywood studios.
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While the deal still needs to be ratified following a member vote to be held from Oct. 2-9, the details revealed about the pact with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) are points the WGA East leadership is immensely proud of and has every hope will be cleared by the union.
“That’s one of the realizations that’s gonna settle into a lot of members as we go forward — is that, not only did we achieve these gains, we achieved them forever,” Takeuchi Cullen told Variety on Wednesday evening prior to entering the Manhattan Center for the membership meeting. “It’s now codified in our contract, and they can never go back from declaring that writers rooms must exist for television shows, from defining what a showrunner is, and that the showrunner is a writer, from giving us these protections for AI, which we knew was a storm that was right around the corner, and we knew we had to handle it now in this negotiation, or in three years, it would be too late,” she said.
Peterson added: “Early on, we read a lot in the trades and we heard across the table from the AMPTP, and some of the industry side people, the company side people, saying, you can’t want everything, that’s just not the way it works. But then we would say, we do want everything — but it wasn’t greed, it wasn’t over-ambition on our part, because this stuff is interlocking.”
As WGA is nearing the end of their battle with the AMPTP following a 148-day strike, actors guild SAG-AFTRA is just about to return to the table to restart negotiations about their own deal. See below for more from Variety‘s Q&A with Takeuchi Cullen and Peterson, in which they break down WGA’s “risky and unusual” choice to try to get the AMPTP to agree to their desire to continue to respect SAG-AFTRA‘s picket lines while the actors guild seeks a resolution of its strike that began July 14.
What was the turning point in negotiations for you?
Lisa Takeuchi Cullen: I’m gonna say the big turning point was when SAG-AFTRA joined us. That was a huge turning point that changed the game. I think that the studios perhaps always expected that the writers would walk and maybe that was always a part of their calculations. I will bet you $100 — that’s all I have right now because I’ve been unemployed for five months– I would bet you $100 that they never, ever expected the actors to walk. And so when they did, it changed everything for us. And our members continued to stay strong on the line. Our union brothers and sisters on the Teamsters and IATSE and musicians guild, all of the other unions supported us. And for me, personally, emotionally, that was the turning point.
Lowell Peterson: The solidarity of SAG-AFTRA, the Teamsters and IATSE, that is something that the AMPTP didn’t bargain for. They thought they could isolate us and they were wrong from day one of our strike. And it became crystal clear on July 14, that we were not going to be isolated and that playbook had to be ripped up and thrown out. I was out on the line this afternoon. There were a lot of Writers Guild members. We’re going to be out there with them the way they were out there with us. We’re not striking but we’re standing in support and picketing. There’s something energizing about having people from various unions with you, as you’re marching to negotiate the best contract you can, and we’re going to do that for SAG-AFTRA the way they did for us.
I know there were conversations late in negotiations with the studios about wanting to still respect SAG-AFTRA’s picket lines once you reached a tentative agreement. How did you arrive at that choice and what is the attitude upon your inability to ultimately get that ask past the AMPTP?
Takeuchi Cullen: We made the risky and unusual decision to add that ask in the middle of negotiations. In the midst of being out on the picket lines with all these other unions supporting us, we knew that no other unions’ jobs are protected if they don’t cross another union’s picket lines — except for Teamsters and certain IATSE Locals. But SAG doesn’t have that, none of the other unions have that. We wanted to make that ask and make that push to show the studios how serious we were about all of our unions being united in our asks and our needs and demands. And even though we, in the end, didn’t get that provision, we are going to continue to tell our members that we support these other unions. And just like SAG doesn’t have that provision in their contract and still came out and supported us, we’re going to do the same for them and for the other sister unions.
A lot of SAG-AFTRA members see the points won in WGA’s tentative deal as a sign of an easier negotiation process on those same issues for the actors guild. Would you say the same and are you in communication with them about their own upcoming negotiations?
Takeuchi Cullen: The writers have different needs than the actors do, although some of our issues certainly overlap, like in the issues of AI. But even there, not exactly. So our leaders and our staff, or executive staff, were in close contact with the leaders of those unions. Lowell has been talking to IATSE and SAG and Teamsters constantly throughout. So all of our leadership was in close communication. And in yes, we have to keep supporting each other.
Peterson: I think there are certain aspects of our deal that hopefully will pattern to SAG-AFTRA, and we hope we’ve created a momentum. We’ve sort of broken the resistance of the AMPTP to the big changes that SAG-AFTRA is also looking for. Certain things, as Lisa said, are really gonna be specific. There are things that we got for writers that nobody else needed, there are things that they need for actors that nobody else needs, but the overall momentum and the fact that we were able to create structural change, I think will be helpful.
What is WGA East doing to help in the transition back to work, especially for writers that weren’t attached to writers rooms or out of work at the time the strike began?
Takeuchi Cullen: Here in the east, we don’t have as many writers rooms as they do in the west. However, we have a good core of working writers, many in film, many in Appendix A on daytime serials, on comedy variety. We have a large proportion of the comedy variety writers here and those writers will go back right away. So we’re here to support them. The fight continues. We learned during the strike what a struggle it is for so many of our members to find work and keep working. And we’ve created more programs to help support them in that and we’re going to keep doing that. That doesn’t end just because the strike has ended.
Peterson: We’re giving as much information as we can possibly give on the details of the deal. And on the details of the return to work. And a lot of people are in different situations. So we’ve encouraged every member, if you have a specific question about how this works for you, call us. Let us help you out. There is going to be a lot of variation. But as Lisa says, the late-night shows we’ll be going back shortly. Rooms will be reopening. But remember, production is still shut down. So it’s not as if suddenly a light switch is going to kind of flip and everybody’s going to be back at work. That’s another reason to fight for SAG.
(Pictured: WGA East leaders including Lowell Peterson, third from left, and Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, fourth from left.)
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misquoted Lisa Takuechi Cullen saying, “We knew that some other unions’ jobs are protected if they don’t cross another union’s picket lines.” Cullen actually said “no other unions’ jobs.”
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