Yahoo News Writers Strike Messaging War Reshapes Standoff With Studios
Negotiators for the Writers Guild of America and the studios will surely both claim victory whenever they resolve the contract dispute that’s prompted the strike, now in its ninth week, and attendant production shutdown. Yet conventional wisdom is that, at least when it comes to public communications, the PR “war” has been decisively won by the guild from the get-go.
Credit a unique sense of solidarity across Hollywood’s aggrieved labor community in 2023 and writers’ tendency toward communication. Or the imperviousness of corporate leaders whose chief stakeholder concern appears to be shareholder value, and who have recently preferred not to wade into labor battles on the record. Or a reorientation of the information battle space. The influential if often notorious anonymous comment boards of the 2007-08 strike cycle have been supplanted by prolific social media accounts, operated under real names.
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The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which bargains on behalf of studios, has adhered to its norm of speaking and responding rarely, most often through carefully worded statements. (Per its longtime practice, the group — like the WGA — also conveys its message through on-background conversations with journalists.) Meanwhile, the guild’s grassroots has sought to define the narrative, both in the streets through its daily pickets of studios and streamers as well as online, where its members publicly post with unfiltered abandon to humanize their perceived plight as often as to persuade.
Of course, this embrace-the-mess approach can be complicated, especially in a union with 11,500 members currently on strike, some of whom wield bigger megaphones than the organization itself. “I can’t imagine being WGA comms right now,” says a communications director at a major non-Hollywood union who notes that the reason unions exist is to provide individual workers with a powerful collective voice. “To have some members with platforms bigger than the organization? That’s a unique challenge.”
The guild has generally taken a hands-off approach to its rank-and-file’s messaging, for the most part neither dictating talking points nor attempting to give notes that might hem output. (These are, of course, professional writers.) It’s unconventional for a large institution of any sort: allowing the tail to, at least publicly, wag the dog. Union officials declined to discuss the approach, and the AMPTP declined to comment.
Los Angeles Times journalist Matt Pearce, president of Media Guild of the West, which represents journalists in California and other states — and whose members have also tended to be vocal on the internet during high-profile labor actions — observes, approvingly, “It’s the union actually becoming its membership, a mass-movement organization, rather than a nonprofit representing a group.”
Posting’s efficacy in moving the needle on negotiations can perhaps best be indirectly measured. Joe Russo, a WGA strike captain, assistant lot coordinator at CBS Television City and active tweeter (the Hard Kill writer, not the co-director of Avengers: Endgame), believes it played a role in Netflix shareholders nixing executive compensation in a nonbinding early June vote. “We can really rally behind each other and clearly, effectively dump water on fires,” he says. (Pearce cautions that there can be a limit to such pressure tactics, noting that Alden Global Capital, which has gutted the newsrooms it owns in recent years, “has been scolded and publicly shamed to death” by his union’s membership — to no avail.)
Ivy Kagan Bierman, chair of Loeb & Loeb’s entertainment labor group, one of the industry’s few attorneys representing major firms in negotiations with guilds and unions (including Verve when it dealt with the WGA during the recent agencies dispute), contends that, in aggregate, the writers’ social media output will likely have less potential impact on the final agreed terms of an AMPTP deal than on whether it gets ratified. “If you’ve got members posting very negative things about a deal and saying they’re not going to vote for it, that can spiral, and you could have a domino effect and you could have more and more members saying, ‘Oh, well then I’m not going to vote for that deal either.’”
Still, before a deal has been reached, social media has played a key role in boosting morale and heightening engagement around guild events. Kagan Bierman points out that social media removes the need for union officials to spend hours on the phone, encouraging members to engage in collective activity like events and demonstrations; now, members can take only a few minutes to tweet enthusiastically about themed pickets (like a recent Die Hard gathering, or “Bey Day”) and reasonably expect that their peers will hear or read about the event. “Some friends that aren’t in the WGA but are in other unions come out specifically because they said, ‘Oh, I saw your posts about the special pickets, and this sounded fun and this looked fun, and I wanted to support,’” says writer Gina Ippolito (The Unicorn), another member who frequently tweets about WGA issues and has encouraged non-WGA members to attend events.
When WGA members want to raise awareness about specific picketing issues — such as the sidewalk construction outside the NBCUniversal lot or when a BMF producer allegedly threatened striking writers with a dangerous car maneuver — they have quickly taken to Twitter with their accounts of events, highlighting information and framing stories on their terms.
A former guild staffer tells The Hollywood Reporter that the online dynamic, whatever its merits, also comes with the price of silencing dissent, as a cheerleading, on-message ethos prevails: “I don’t think [people] can have free and fair conversations at all because the bullies are going to bully.” (It can also flatten nuance around more complex conversations that are happening in-person surrounding, for instance, the guild’s attempt to set minimum staffing requirements for writers rooms, or the Directors Guild of America’s recent deal, which several writers have pilloried on Twitter.)
Van Robichaux, another energetically tweeting strike captain, also at CBS Television City, rejects the notion, pointing to the fact that 97.9 percent of members voted to authorize the strike in April. “The people who may be less positive about the strike would love to believe they are part of some silent majority, but I don’t buy the case that there’s some significant number of writers who feel like they can’t speak out about things they disagree with the guild on,” he says.
Whatever the case, Russo argues that rank-and-file WGA members are playing to their strengths as the strike continues. As writers “we can use those 280 characters really effectively and get a message out very concisely,” he says, referring to Twitter. “You basically give a tool like that to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of writers who are clever and funny, and you can help build empathy around the cause.”
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