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.

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.

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.