Statement from the Writers Guild of America

From the WGA website, posted November 1, 2007:

Contract 2007 Negotiations Statement

Thursday night, nearly 3,000 WGA members packed the LA Convention Center. At this meeting, the largest membership meeting in Guild history, writers heard the WGA Negotiating Committee’s report on the status of negotiations. The Negotiating Committee reported that the AMPTP had called a halt to negotiations by demanding we accept the extension of the current DVD formula to new media. They also reported that in three months of negotiations, the AMPTP has not responded in any serious manner to our initial proposals.

The Negotiating Committee then announced its unanimous recommendation that the WGAW Board and the WGAE Council call a strike.

Members spent three hours in frank discussion of the Negotiating Committee’s report and recommendation. The membership expressed their anger at the Companies’ refusal to bargain seriously, and voiced their overwhelming support for the Negotiating Committee, Guild leadership, and for the bargaining agenda of the WGA.

The WGAW Board and the WGAE Council will meet Friday to consider the recommendation of the Negotiating Committee and to decide the next steps. The decision of the Board and Council whether and when to strike will be communicated to the membership by e-mail and through the Captains system, and will be posted on the WGAW and WGAE websites.

I think the best summary of this whole situation came in a Wired article I saw yesterday (my emphasis added):

Producers demanded that the guild drop its request to increase DVD royalties and electronic sell-through percentages. Unfortunately, that’s at the heart of what’s driving the strike threat for writers. The scribes want a bigger cut of DVD sales and another percentage point or two off the top of online sales (iTunes, etc.). So, the producers offering to settle if the guild drops all that is like the Galactic Empire telling Luke Skywalker, “OK, we’ll surrender … but only if we get to keep the Death Star.”

• It begins
• Something wicked this way comes
• Contract prognosis: Grim
• Temporary stay of execution?
• Still within striking distance . . .
• Hello darkness, my old friend
• Halloween nightmare: The writers’ strike looms