'The current circumstances will at some point end,' says the guild leader on the eve of the union's election.
"The current circumstances will at some point end," says the guild leader on the eve of the union's election.
Give me a little bit of transparency into how the president and board work with staff on shaping strategy on something like the agency issue. In this campaign, because writers have had so much more contact with agents, we understand agents in a way that staff doesn’t and staff has taken our orders on how we deal with this and how we proceed.
Does the guild have research that shows causality, that the packaging model actually causes the suppression of writer incomes? The goal has been to make sure that agents are acting in the best interest of writers. These agencies have been engaged in corporate practices that are not in the best interests of writers. So to answer your question, how long can writers go without agents: I’m listening to our members and our members are still — but we’ll know more Monday — still very much completely in favor of what we’re doing in a large majority.
And I think for the middle class feature writer, you’ve got to really be hustling, a lot of your time, hustling for work because it’s so competitive out there and because you don’t know which jobs are going to come through and things can take a long time. Whereas, in television work on the staffing side you know if you’re up for a job on a staff, you know pretty fast whether you got the job, because that show’s got to go in production.
That is significant money certainly if that is the case. But what gets lost in this whole conversation that you and I are having and that I’m having in the guild and having with the agencies is that in those conversations we’re talking only about the money that the agencies get for and we’re ignoring the fact that are the companies we work for made $50 billion in profit every year. The companies are doing just fine. This extra money from packaging wouldn’t even be a blip on their profit sheet.
There’s no question there’s vulnerability, because they need us. How much they can ride out a conflict with us is a whole other thing. And that’s also based on how well we’ve done our job, talking to the members, understanding what the members’ priorities are and holding them together. At the end of the day there really are only three tools, aren’t there? One is clear enough communication and calculation on both sides that you come to agreement. The second is a strike authorization vote and then the third is an actual strike.
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