Bill Carrick and Kam Kuwata are the anti-Chris Lehane.

The Writers Guild of America has retained veteran Democratic political consultants Bill Carrick and Kam Kuwata to provide assistance on the strategic and PR fronts of the 8-week-old strike.

“We both have friends in the WGA,” Kuwata told Daily Variety. “And we have landed a lot of times on the sides that are pro-labor.”

The duo came aboard earlier this month at the guild’s behest in the wake of the Dec. 7 collapse of negotiations between the WGA and the AMPTP, which insisted that the guild remove half a dozen proposals from the table as a condition of continuing to bargain. The WGA refused, and no new talks have been scheduled, while the Directors Guild of America is widely expected to set a start date for negotiations on its contract within the next week.

Kuwata said he and Carrick will work for the WGA for as long as needed.

Carrick ran the Angelides campaign and Kuwata has worked a lot with DiFi in the past.  But at least that they understand that Democrats stand with workers, unlike Chris Lehane.  I’d rather reject that corporate money and be on the side of those who just want their fair share.

Things are moving on a variety of fronts in the WGA strike.  While the AMPTP stalls and makes baseless charges, the Guild is trying some novel approaches.  Not only have they filed an unfair labor practices charge against the AMPTP for walking away from a good-faith negotiation, they are challenging the very idea of bargaining with a cartel like the AMPTP itself.

Confronted with a logjam in its contract talks with the studios, the Writers Guild of America is trying a new tack: Divide and conquer.

On Monday, the union representing 10,500 striking writers plans to approach the major companies of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers about negotiating with them individually, a move aimed at exploiting perceived cracks in the alliance and getting at least some of the studios back to the bargaining table.

“We want to do everything in our power to move negotiations forward and end this devastating strike,” the guild’s negotiating committee said in a letter to be sent to union members today. “The internal dynamics of the [alliance] make it difficult for the conglomerates to reach consensus and negotiate with us on a give-and-take basis.”

This approach is already bearing fruit.  David Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants Inc., has agreed to negotiate their own deal with the writers .  Because Letterman owns his program (as well as Late Night with Craig Ferguson), he can break with the AMPTP cartel and make this deal.

(I just want to step in and say that AMPTP.com is maybe the funniest parody site I’ve seen in a long time.)

But all is not well.  With the AMPTP furious over these cracks in their united front (some would call it collusion), they’ve leaned on some of their stars to return to work.

Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien will return to late-night TV with fresh episodes on Jan. 2, two months after the writers’ strike sent them into repeats, the network said Monday.

The “Tonight” show and “Late Night” will return without writers supplying jokes. NBC said the decision was similar to what happened in 1988, when Johnny Carson brought back the “Tonight” show two months into a writers’ strike.

A similar return – with writers – appears in the works for David Letterman. The union representing striking writers said over the weekend that it was willing to negotiate deals with individual production companies, including Letterman’s Worldwide Pants.

It’s disappointing that Leno and O’Brien aren’t willing to hold out and see the big picture, but of course they are under contract.  It’s telling that this move was made as soon as Letterman signaled his intention to strike a deal with the writers.

However, in contrast to this action, it appears that the writer’s strike is opening up eyes about what it means to work in this country, about what it means to stand together for worker’s rights.  The DGA, after flirting with starting negotiations with the AMPTP, has demurred.  The writers are promoting separate labor issues like the plight of FedEx workers being called “independent contractors” so management can avoid providing benefits.  And they’re aiding in significant victories for the worker’s rights movement.

In a memo issued this afternoon, MTV Networks performed a near-180, relenting to complaints from freelancers who were told last week their benefits would be cut. “We’ve implemented a process for evaluating freelance and temporary employee positions for possible conversion to staff positions,” reads the announcement from JoAnne Griffith, MTVN’s executive vice president for HR. “This process is currently underway.” Freelancers will now have the choice to continue with their current health plan-including dental!-or sign on to MTV’s Aetna plan. Either way, they won’t have to make the decision until February of next year, nearly three months after the original deadline set by the company last week.

The writer’s strike is one of the most high-profile labor actions of the last 30 years.  It’s crystallizing a lot of ideas about basic fairness for workers.  This is maybe the most positive by-product of this important action.

We learned yesterday that Chris Lehane used to do damage control for the corporation trying to limit PR fallout from massive health and safety violations while building the eastern span of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.  He’s currently plying his trade as a paid shill for studios and networks who have the simple goal of busting the Hollywood labor movement.  

Writers, (WGA head Patric Verrone) said, were looking to restore a sense of leverage and status that had been lost as ever-larger corporations took control of the entertainment business. He described Hollywood as teetering on the brink of a dark age, as far as creative types were concerned. “I think if they could do this business without us, they would, and so making our task as mechanical and simple and low-paying and unartistic as possible,” Mr. Verrone said.

The solution, he added, was to squeeze the corporations that own the studios, in an effort to represent the legion of writers on reality and animated shows that the guild had not organized through sign-up drives […]

Accusing guild leaders of pursuing “an ideological mission far removed from the interests of their members,” representatives of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expressed outrage over continuing demands of the writers that were not strictly related to pay.

These include requests for jurisdiction over those who write for reality TV shows and animated movies; for oversight of the fair-market value of intracompany transactions that might affect writer pay; and the elimination of a no-strike clause that prevents guild members from honoring the picket lines of other unions once a contract is reached.

The tone of shock in the producers’ statement seemed a bit artificial, as Mr. Verrone has for months laid out his plan to elevate the writers’ industry status.

This is the part where Lehane picked up the story and started writing it from his suite.

Yet their anger is genuine. Executives know that to concede the writers’ noneconomic demands would lead to a radical shift in industry power.

Riiight.  See, now it’s conglomerates 99.999999%, employees 0.000001%.  If you actually gave the same benefits to everyone who generates a script, whether they did so before or after the shoot, that would shoot up to .000009%!  That’s a 9-fold increase!

And the other complaint, that a no-strike clause would be a death knell to the business, is absurd.  This is a classic strategy of divide and conquer.  Forcing union members to work and not honor another union’s strike is an attempt at isolation and union busting.  This city’s unions don’t get along that well; often they’re competing for membership (IATSE’s leader just blasted the WGA because they have some animation writers in their stable and they don’t want to lose them).  Furthermore, on any given day 1 out of 3 industry workers are unemployed.  There’s already little incentive for solidarity, and the studios want to eliminate that even further.

Let me introduce you to a new word: permalance.  I know it because I’ve been one, on several occasions.  In no other business that I know can you be working for 40 hours a week at one company for several months and not be a permanent employee.  MTV workers just learned the hard way why conglomerates do this: because it gives you no leverage.

Scores of workers from MTV Networks walked off the job yesterday afternoon, filling the sidewalk outside the headquarters of its corporate parent, Viacom, to protest recent changes in benefits.

Freelance workers from MTV Networks outside the headquarters of the company’s corporate parent, Viacom, Monday.

The walkout highlighted the concerns of a category of workers who are sometimes called permalancers: permanent freelancers who work like full-time employees but do not receive the same benefits.

Waving signs that read “Shame on Viacom,” the workers, most of them in their 20s, demanded that MTV Networks reverse a plan to reduce health and dental benefits for freelancers beginning Jan. 1.

In a statement, MTV Networks noted that its benefits program for full-time employees had also undergone changes, and it emphasized that the plan for freelancers was still highly competitive within the industry. Many freelancers receive no corporate benefits.

In other words, you’re lucky you get anything at all, so STFU.

The media business has being playing this game for years, and because most of their employees are too young to know the difference, there’s been little outcry.  The WGA labor action is shining a bright light on the practices of this industry, which is a massive profit-maker globally.  At some point, you get sick and tired of being pushed around.

The AP calls the new contract proposal from the studios to the WGA a sweetened offer.  The United Hollywood blog says otherwise.

That big, amazing proposal that the companies hinted to Nikki Finke was coming? Well, it came.

Turns out their exciting, groundbreaking proposal is… a residual rollback. And not just any rollback, one of the biggest in the history of the Guild. Then, stunningly, the companies have the balls to say their plan gives us more compensation. Well, I’m sorry, but If you take away a dollar and give me a nickel, the nickel ain’t a raise. Somewhere, Nick Counter’s first-grade math teacher is embarrassed […]

When an hourlong episode of television is streamed on the Internet, writers would get a flat $250 payment for one year of reuse. That’s $250 as opposed to, for example, $20,000 per episode when it’s reused on network television. They proposed nothing new on downloads, it’s still the DVD formula for those (ie. two-thirds of a penny for an iTunes download). For theatrical movies, they’re offering exactly $0.00 on streaming. Oh, and they want to be able to define any content they like as “promotional” — for which they would pay zero dollars. Even if they stream an entire film or tv episode, and even if they sell ads on it, they can call that promotional and pay us nothing.

Looks to me like the AMPTP responded to the positive public opinion generated by the writers by trying to get public opinion on their side over their “generous offer,” and subsequently call the writers “whiners” or something when they refuse to accept it.  With the information out now, that’s not likely to happen.

Though there’s been a news blackout from the bargaining table, many in the entertainment community are cheered by Nikki Finke’s report that a deal is imminent in the 4 week-old writer’s strike.  Her source makes sense, saying that the agents have brokered this; they have a stake in both writer profits and studio profits, not to mention getting production back in gear again. 

However, in the wake of this impending deal we should not forget about the forgotten writer’s strike of 2006.  I’ve been saying from the beginning that the strategy of the WGA, to get as much as they can for current members instead of growing the membership, is fatally flawed, and will result in a constriction of revenue for writers as less and less spots on the TV schedule will require them.  Daniel Blau came forward last week with the inside story:

In the early summer of 2006, only one of the “Top Model” writers was involved in the union campaign. The rest of us were, at best, tangentially aware of its existence. Until, that is, the afternoon of June 21. That was the date of our first official meeting with WGA organizers. Over lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Santa Monica, they spelled out the manifold benefits of guild representation: health insurance, pension contributions and credits for our work. The industry was ready for reality story editors to enter the WGA, they said. Les Moonves — head of CBS, which owned the new CW network — had been “put on notice.” There was no talk of losing our jobs. We believed the guild’s ambiguous promise, “you’ll come out of this better than you went in.”

Why only “Top Model?” one co-worker asked. Why not all reality shows? “‘Big Brother’ is ready to go out,” they told us. “So is ‘The Amazing Race.’ But you need to start the ball rolling.” We would be the vanguard. Our fellow reality scribes would take to the street inspired by our courage, they said. They bought us lunch […]

The next morning, July 20, in front of our production offices in West Los Angeles, I read our statement to about 100 supporters and the news crews, officially launching our strike. We hoisted our WGA strike signs and never entered those offices again. In the weeks to come, our supporters would dwindle, then disappear.

The last week of September, we all received letters notifying us that our jobs had been eliminated, the entire story department abolished. The guild had vanished from our cause, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents the video editors, swooped in to unionize the show, freezing the WGA out of “Top Model” for good.

The lack of organizing for nonfiction and reality shows has given the studios a powerful fallback position which represents 25% of this season’s network schedule, and will only grow if writer benefits expand in a new contract.  This strike is noble, and from a public relations standpoint, the WGA has hit a home run.  The organizing strategy is simply flawed, and I’m not sanguine about the prospects for the future.

On Oct. 23 of this year, with talks stalled between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Variety published an article summed up by this headline: “WGA gives up on nonscripted effort.” Organizing reality TV writers was one of the contract demands that the WGA was willing to toss aside to reach a deal before the Nov. 1 strike deadline, the article reported.

The next day, an e-mail with the expected rebuttal arrived from the WGA president. The guild’s reality TV efforts were as strong as ever, he said. But as far as I could tell, the only error in the Variety article was that it hadn’t been published a year earlier.

So let’s hope there’s a resolution in the offing, but one that recognizes that any show with a script – and every show I’ve ever worked on has one, be it fiction, nonfiction, reality, game show, whatever – deserves benefits for whoever created it.

Other labor leaders are coalescing around the writer’s strike because they know that a hig-profile action like this will have positive benefits for them, and might actually start a conversation about union representation in America.  If the adage of “If it’s not on TV, it didn’t happen” holds true, then “If it’s stopping TV, it’s REALLY happening” holds even truer.  Joss Whedon explains:

“The trappings of a union protest…” You see how that works? Since we aren’t real workers, this isn’t a real union issue. (We’re just a guild!) […] this IS a union issue, one that will affect not just artists but every member of a community that could find itself at the mercy of a machine that absolutely and unhesitatingly would dismantle every union, remove every benefit, turn every worker into a cowed wage-slave in the singular pursuit of profit. (There is a machine. Its program is ‘profit’. This is not a myth.) This is about a fair wage for our work. No different than any other union. The teamsters have recognized the importance of this strike, for which I’m deeply grateful. Hopefully the Times will too.

I love the cross-union solidarity that this strike has engendered.  It’s not just the Teamsters; Steve Carell single-handedly shut down The Office, for example.  And now Hillary Clinton has joined other Democratic Presidential hopefuls with a strong statement of support.

“I support the Writers Guild’s pursuit of a fair contract that pays them for their work in all mediums. I hope the producers and writers will return to the bargaining table to work out an equitable contract that keeps our entertainment industry strong and recognizes the contributions writers make to the success of the industry.”

No talks have been scheduled, as the studios appear to be preferring a “bleed them out” strategy, despite the WGA already conceding on expanding DVD residuals.  While I still feel that jurisdiction and expanding membership should be a strong part of any final deal, clearly the writers deserve a fair share of the profits they are instrumental in creating.

The Writers Guild of America took to the streets today, beginning what promises to be a long strike in one of the largest industries in California.  I couldn’t be more in support of the people who are the lifeblood of Hollywood, the creative personnel that are the engine of the last vibrant manufacturing industry in America.  Unfortunately, I’m getting the sense that their leadership is falling back on an old union strategy of securing benefits for their existing membership rather than allowing their membership to grow, and this will have disastrous consequences for the future of the labor movement.

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post, It’s the Unions, Stupid, which documented my experience at a Writers Guild meeting dedicated to organizing reality and nonfiction television storytellers. 

Yes, a lot of reality television is slipshod, exploitative and dumbed-down. But people don’t understand that the rank-and-file who work in it are often being as exploited as the contestants. Reality is big because of its low costs, mainly because, unlike scripted shows, it is not unionized. This has become a bargaining chip for the networks in their dealings with the Writer’s Guild, Director’s Guild, and others: take our crappy contract, or we’ll just make more reality shows.

Reality show workers make less than their counterparts in scripted TV. They work largely on weekly salaries, usually for no overtime, yet during stressful parts of production 16-hour days and weekend work are all too typical. Their credits are so amorphous that they bear no relation to the actual job worked. If a reality show is sold to another network for use in reruns, none of the workers see any residual fees. They have no employer-paid health care or pensions, and as freelancers on short-term assignments, they have little or no job security. 1 out of every 3 TV and film industry professionals are out of work on any given day in Hollywood (just go to a coffee shop at 2:30 on a Wednesday for proof).

This probably sounds whiny to many, and actually, it should. Most of these people are well-paid for the work that they do. Of course, that’s mainly because of the power of collective bargaining. The sundry labor unions have forced Hollywood to share its profits with its employees, with very few exceptions. But while reality television workers do benefit from that to a degree, they are the crack in the dike that allows the networks to cash in.

Along with hundreds of others, I signed a card at that time, in May 2005, allowing the WGA to negotiate on my behalf.  These negotiations ran up against a brick wall.  There were a couple high-profile meetings and protests.  Nothing.  There were lawsuits against production companies who were making their employees work 18-hour days, falsifying time cards, changing start dates and delaying productions that cost the employees thousands of dollars.  They resulted in brief reconciliations that were eventually rolled back.  There was a high-profile strike last year by the writer-producers of America’s Next Top Model.  The editors, who were unionized through IATSE, didn’t honor the picket line, the season of shows were finished, and those writers were not brought back the following season.  There was talk of a “wage-and-hour” campaign, to sue the production companies for overtime pay.  It never materialized.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the coming negotiations on a new contract.  Many thought that organizing reality and nonfiction storytellers would be a key bargaining chip.  After all, in the event of a strike, the studios could simply ramp their nonunion shows into production and move forward with business as usual.  So to avert the same thing happening far into the future, it made sense for the WGA to take a stand now, expand their membership, and leave the studios with less wiggle room to make a schedule during subsequent threats to walk out.  Indeed, this is exactly what the studios are saying is their alternative now.

Prime-time schedules would appear relatively unchanged for a couple of months, since a handful of episodes have already been prepared. But if the strike drags on the 2008 schedule will be heavy on reality shows (not covered by the current contracts) and reruns […]

Though CW Entertainment Chief Dawn Ostroff says they’re prepared, with new reality series like Farmer Wants a Wife and Crowned waiting in the wings, she, too, sees no advantage to striking: “It’s just better for everyone if habits aren’t broken and if people that are getting into characters and shows are able to continue to do so.”

I’m not at the bargaining table, so I can only go by the many reports I’ve seen, but it appears to me that the WGA is holding the line on DVD and Internet residuals.  Now, those are important issues that must be part of an overall agreement.  But the difference between those benefits discussions and expanding membership to other programming mirrors the central debate within the labor community; should they get as much for the dwindling numbers of union members they have, or should the focus be on expanding membership?  This is the schism that caused the SEIU and other unions to leave the AFL-CIO and form the Change To Win coalition.  Andy Stern and the other new-labor leaders firmly believe that the old paradigm is failing America, where union membership has declined to a great degree over the past 50 years.  If you give management a lifeline, a way to get their work done without having to deal with a union, they’re going to take it.  There are significantly less situation comedies in production than there were ten years ago.  There are less dramas, too, at least at the network level.

I hear the criticism that reality shows are cheap and tawdry and a major factor in the decline of Western civilization.  To a large extent I agree with it.  But if you hate reality shows, the number one thing you should hope for is that they become organized.  Ratings are only a small part of the story of reality’s success; with the exception of American Idol, that growth has leveled off.  It’s the enormous difference in production costs that has led to the burgeoning of the genre, and that’s entirely attributable to the fact that they’re nonunion.  The chain of TV and entertainment can only be as strong as its weakest link.  And I believe that, by foregrounding the monetary issues and not fighting to expand the membership, the WGA is undergoing the wrong strategy for the future, one that will ensure that their members have less opportunities to practice their craft.

United Hollywood is giving constant updates, as well as the LA Times’ Hollywood Writers blog.  I will support the strike in any way possible.  But I wish that the leadership would understand the need for a new-labor strategy, to increase the fortunes of the middle class and ensure that nobody is left behind.

I like to say that I work in the last big manufacturing industry left in America – entertainment production.  That manufacturing may be grinding to a halt soon.

With the clock running out on the contract between Hollywood’s writers and producers Wednesday, negotiators made little progress toward a new deal, and both sides prepared for a strike that could begin as early as Friday.

Representatives of the two unions – the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West – met with bargainers for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Wednesday morning after a federal mediator helped jump-start the stalled talks.

But the two sides broke off talks Wednesday night, allowing the contract to expire at midnight. Writers had presented freshly drawn proposals that left their principal demands intact, according to a guild leader, and producers made no immediate move to accommodate them.

There really has been no progress throughout the talks.  Writers want a greater share of DVD residuals (they didn’t see that revenue stream coming during the last contract), a deal on new media payments like digital downloads, and an expansion of collective bargaining to cover reality and nonfiction shows.

This could have a ripple effect throughout the industry, with productions shutting down.  They’ve front-loaded a lot of their programming and endeavored to shoot as much as possible in anticipation of the strike.  It’s pretty clear that’s what’s going to happen.  Next year, the Director’s Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild have contracts that end in June, which would really cripple the industry.  It appears that the studios would rather placate them and play hardball with the writers, as contract talks with directors are already ongoing.

There is unfortunately no cross-union partnership in Hollywood, in fact there’s quite a bit of animosity between some of them.  We are probably looking at a protracted walkout, without the other unions coming to their aid.  And in a city where one out of every three employees in the industry are out of work on any given day, it’s hard to incentivize mass action and non-union solidarity.  You can be easily replaced.

Stay tuned…