Speech by David A Goodman at March 27, 2019 WGA Agency Agreement Membership Meeting Text Dashboard Dashboard

Presentation by WGAW President David A. Goodman

March, 2019

Thank you all for coming. As every one of you knows, we’ve reached an important moment. I feel I don’t have to summarize too much for you what this campaign is about. You all know about the conflicts of interests of packaging fees and agencies becoming producers, and the Guild’s feeling that this is in part responsible for the downward pressure on writers’ income. Our goal for a new agency agreement remains to realign the agencies’ incentives so their welfare is once again directly tied to writers.

We’re not naïve. We prepare to negotiate and battle with the companies every three years, and we know how penny-pinching they are. But your leadership no longer believes that the companies’ intransigence alone explains why the agencies and companies are doing great, while writers are not.

The truth is that, as this negotiation has gone along, it has become even clearer to us that the agency business model is fundamentally flawed. It has become clear because we listen to every argument they make, we parse every word of what they say publicly, we seek to find a place for meaningful compromise.

When they made coherent arguments about indie film, we listened. When they made coherent arguments about commission at scale, we listened. When they told us last week that they want to be sure that any writer information they provide is held in proper confidence, we listened, and yesterday our proposals to the agencies reflected all of those changes, and some others we made at the suggestion of writers or small agencies.

But the agency arguments about their conflicts of interest are completely unconvincing to your elected leadership and negotiating committee. Many of you have heard them directly from the agencies, probably more than once.

Leaving the problem of packaging fees and affiliated studios to individual writer choice is no choice at all. And when we have insisted on serious conversation, they have resorted to threats and fearmongering. So, although we made a set of proposals a year ago, and though we’ve had negotiations, we have not made significant progress on the key issues. We have two fundamental demands, and the agency response to them is not serious. Our first demand is that their interests must be allied with ours, rather than conflicted. They cannot take money from our employers for access to us and our writing, and they cannot be our bosses as well as our representatives. The second demand is they must accept that, since it is our Guild that delegates the overscale bargaining role to agencies, they must report information to our Guild so that the Guild can help defend us against many things, including free work, late pay and agency financial shenanigans. It tells us something very important when such righteous demands are treated as crazy. Our demands are not crazy. They are just and necessary. So today’s vote is the vote I talked about in my first speech to you in February: this is when the union decides what it is we’re going to do next. It is a vote that the agencies themselves also recognize as important; they have said in meetings with writers that any real negotiation won’t start until after the vote.

Success may come through a deal with the agencies before April 7th. Or it may come because writers vote to give the West Board and East Council the authority to implement a Code of Conduct after April 6th. Such a vote means that writers are willing to leave any agency that does not sign the Code, until such a time as the agency signs.

Like every union struggle, this one involves the exercise of collective power, and there is no way around the risk and the uncertainty. Fundamentally, a union is a fighting organization when it needs to be. Historically that is how we’ve made the gains we’ve made. We don’t fight just for the sake of fighting; we make prudent decisions about if and when to engage in struggle. This is one of those decision times. When there’s a battle at hand we discuss and debate and try to unite writers. Those who are more privileged support those who are more vulnerable. We exercise our power to make victory happen.
 
But let’s talk openly about the difficulties that seem most prominent.

First, what does success in the agency campaign look like? I want to spend a few minutes discussing the pressure that many of us have felt over the past weeks after the agencies began to understand that the Guild and its members were serious about our demands. As we anticipated, this campaign has felt personal in a way our negotiations with the studios rarely do. Many of us have close, personal ties with agents that go beyond our professional relationship. Some of them have been real advocates in an uncertain business and, to varying degrees, partially responsible for our success.

Some of us may actually be angry that we are being forced to choose between their Guild and our agency.

Perhaps it is best to remember, first, that those agents who warn us that they will cease to represent us are also making a choice. They are choosing their own interests over their relationships with us. And no, we’re not making an argument that agents should represent us out of sentiment. The 10% model made many agencies and agents very, very wealthy over the decades. But now they have gotten used to outsized wealth generated by private deals made with studios, using our leverage, and benefitting mostly them. Though we endure uncertainty in our careers, watch our annual income go up and down, find ourselves on a staff one year and out of work the next, a movie made, followed by years of fallow—they will see their incomes remain constant or they will walk away.

Indeed, the agents’ response to us, as a group and individually, presents a strangely skewed notion of fairness. It’s acceptable for my agent to defend these conflicted—almost certainly illegal—practices and then tell me I have to make a choice between allowing that or losing him or her. And my dilemma is the Guild’s fault. But what standards are we going to hold agents to? Don’t they have a choice to make?

Our personal relationship with an agent does not exist in a vacuum. We are members of a union.

You may feel that the course of your own career—the level of success you have achieved—is worth the packaging deal you had to make with your agent. But that packaging regime and now producing have created an ecosystem that is toxic and detrimental to writers as a whole.

Your agent, as effective as he or she may be for you, has not succeeded in defending writers’ television quotes across the last decade. If you are a feature writer the situation is even worse. Which feature agency has tried to curb the endless abuses of free work? When the Guild proposed a formal partnership, seven years ago, to combat late pay and free work, none of these agencies followed through by voluntarily forwarding the Guild all screen invoices, as they had promised to do. So now we must demand them.

These effective agents have some very successful clients. But they work and profit in a system that has rolled over on writers as a whole.

And if agents and agencies refuse to accept their fiduciary responsibilities, then it will be left to the Guild to protect the interests of writers, because there is no one else. Which brings us back to you.

Though you may often work alone, you are part of a Guild whose collective sacrifice has provided minimums and pensions and health insurance, and jurisdiction over the Internet for all writers. You are part of a Guild whose striking members have accepted uncertainty and hardship—and sometimes terrible hardship—to negotiate MBA deals whose gains are being undone by above-scale concessions that threaten to give it all back. Every three years we fight with the companies to increase writer pay, and every year writers overall earn less in the overscale pay negotiated by agencies and end up further behind.

Yes, this is a painful choice for many of us. Some of us wish that the Guild would shut up and not ask us to sacrifice.

But when, in a decade of unprecedented growth for the industry, writer above-scale income drops, the Guild has an obligation to do something. When the relationship among us and our employers and our representatives is skewed so that our fiduciaries take their income, not from our success, but from the success of the studios, the Guild has an obligation to do something.

Your agents have the first choice to make. Is their loyalty to their agency, or to their clients? If they do not choose you, you may have to choose to let them go.

There is a different type of uncertainty with implementing a Code of Conduct than with an MBA strike. We ask, what happens after April 6th?

On the question of relative hardship, many writers will get up on Monday, April 8th and go to work, but some will be looking for employment and now have to walk away from their agency until this struggle is resolved. How do we help them? We’ve been working on that.

This week we put out a plan in a member email entitled ‘What Happens After April 6th’? It is the product of some incredible work by members of the Board and Negotiating Committee. We know it is difficult to replace agents. There will be trying moments. But our goal is to get through staffing season and whatever period of time it takes to make a fair deal with the agencies.

The Guild is launching two online tools to provide access. The Script Submission System, and the Find a Writer Directory, both for writers looking for work, and for producers and executives looking for writers. All writers are being asked to step up and help their fellow Guild members by committing to do more of what many do anyway, providing an introduction and reference for writers who previously worked for or with them.

Showrunners currently staffing are signing up to accept and read submissions via the Guild’s online Staffing Submission System. They are agreeing to recommend writers who have been on their staffs to other showrunners, and make use of the staffing grids provided by pods, studios and networks. Guild members who are theatrical and non-writing TV producers should also be proactive about looking out for their fellow writers. All are encouraged to consider writers from historically under-represented groups that might be disadvantaged in a time of increased reliance on connections and social networks.

Writers are organizing through the Guild’s captains, committee, and mentor structures. In addition, writers are expanding existing informal networks or organizing new ones.

So it will be up to every one of us to do our part. We have the power, as a membership, to do just that: not to show that we don’t need our agents, but to show that we can hold together as a Guild until the agencies have no choice but to treat us seriously. Remember this: no agent has ever hired a single writer. In television, writers hire writers. And if every person who has served as a showrunner takes on the responsibility to act as an intermediary for the writers, at every level, who have worked for him or her—from staff writer to co-producer to co-ep—if every showrunner with a show to staff is open to the introductions and recommendations from fellow showrunners, pledges to consult lists of diverse writers before they staff, demands from their studios and networks that they recommend diverse and new writers, consults the submission tool that the Guild has provided, then we can ensure that no writer is left behind during this difficult period. We can make this work, not just for ourselves, in this moment, but for all the writers who come after us—most particularly the members who are most hurt by the relentless downward pressure on writer income.

And so we are at the vote. In a democratic union, it is the will of the membership that decides the day. And in the next few days, you will decide. I and your elected leadership believe that we are at an historic moment, poised to make great and unprecedented progress for writers. To do that, we need your support. A strong vote will send a powerful signal to the agencies that they cannot escape responsibility for their long-conflicted practices. I am here to ask you for that yes vote. But let me say this, as much as I want a yes vote from you—I also want an honest vote. If you do not want to impose a Code of Conduct on the agencies, should our negotiations fail—if you do not want to walk, even temporarily, from your agents should the agencies choose packaging over being our true fiduciaries—then you should vote no.

However the vote turns out, I am proud of the fight itself, proud of our willingness as a union to take on the toughest questions in defense of writers, proud of the engagement and passion of our members. We have already shown the entire business our strength, by no longer accepting the status quo and confronting these conflicted and corrupt practices. There will be positive change, and it is because of you. I am very proud to be one of you.