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.

Watch this fabulous video put together by FireDogLake and then click on over to take action. Great song.  Important message.

Send an email to an executive on one of your favorite shows.  I sent one to my favorite new show Life.  I love me a good cop drama, especially one with Sarah Shahi in it.

And if you are on Facebook, don’t forget to join the 1,000,000 fans strong for striking writers.  I hear word that there will be some fun actions coming up soon.

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.