The WGA Strike: "WGA Announces Deal with Letterman's Company"

WGA Announces Deal With Letterman's Company

  By Laeta Kalogridis

It's just been announced that the WGA has made a deal with David Letterman’s company, World Wide Pants. This is part of the larger strategy of making deals with individual companies within the AMPTP.

There are strong feelings about this on both sides – people who think we should have done the deal, people who think we shouldn’t have. Here’s why I think the WGA made the right choice:

Some late-night writers may feel it's unfair for a few writers (i.e. Letterman’s staff) to be able to go back to work when the rest of them can’t. But the fact is, when the WGA first announced its strategy of negotiating independentlywith members of the AMPTP, it was a given that if that strategy succeeded, some writers would go back to work while others stayed on strike.

It’s the heart of the “divide and conquer” strategy that the pressure on individual companies comes from some writers going back to work, thus putting the companies who are willing to deal fairly with us at a competitive advantage. This deal will help create that pressure, especially on NBC and ABC; also, it’s naïve for anyone to think that Letterman isn’t going to be honest in his opinions about the AMPTP on the national stage that is his show. CBS is already furious with him for making this deal, he’s not going to censor himself to make them happy.

Leno, Conan, Kimmel and others have been staunch supporters of the writers, even digging into their own pockets to pay their non-writing crews. The sacrifice they’ve made by staying out this long in support of writers is an incredible thing. But unlike Letterman, who can thumb his nose at CBS because he owns his own company, the other late-night hosts are effectively hostage to the position of their employers, like NBC and ABC.

And since all the hosts are being forced to go back in January anyway, the income stream they provide to the conglomerates will come back no matter what, albeit (we hope) reduced by advertisers rebelling.

So denying Letterman a deal wouldn’t actually have deprived CBS of a revenue stream. At best, it would have reduced the revenue stream. And again, tremendous advertiser pressure will now be put on NBC and ABC to settle this.

Where New Media is concerned, it looks like Pants is going to take full responsibility for the income writers would make from reuse of their work on the Internet. Translation: even though CBS won’t pay that money, World Wide Pants will, and will pay it as per the proposals we presented to the AMPTP that they have walked away from -- twice. Apparently Letterman doesn't feel that giving his writers a fair share of internet revenues will destroy his business.

But the most important strategic value here is that we can completely refute the idea the AMPTP has been peddling that WGA leadership is “intractable” and “incapable” of making a deal.

We’re showing our own membership, the town, and the public at large that the WGA leadership can make a deal, quickly and rationally -- when we’re dealing with rational people on the other side of the table.

We’re not the problem. The AMPTP is the problem.They want a world where unions don’t exist, where they don’t pay any residuals, health insurance, pensions, overtime or benefits to anyone. That’s why they’re willing to try and break our union at horrific cost to everyone who works in entertainment, even though the money they’re saving is minimal by everyone’s estimation. They hope if they break us, the other unions will fall into line, and they’ll be able to eat away at all our benefits piece by piece until union protections are gutted.

This is the kind of behavīor that Wall Street often rewards. But that doesn’t make it actually good for business, much less for the people who make the product the business relies on for its profits.

We want to go back to work, and we want the town back to work – with a fair deal for everyone. Personally, although I know there will be frustration for some members that we made this deal, I think it was the right thing to do.

When one of the majors comes to the table and makes a deal – and I hope they will – odds are that I won’t be one of the writers who gets to go back to work. I won’t like it, because I have a movie in preproduction right now that I've had to walk off of. But I’ll live with it, if it serves the larger good of all of us getting coverage.

Nothing about this strike has been easy, because the AMPTP started with one goal and they haven’t wavered – keep the Internet to themselves. It’s a ridiculous idea, and probably will result in them making themselves obsolete, but they still cling to it. We can’t be any less determined or resolute than they are.

This was a good choice for our leadership to make, the right choice even though it’s painful for some of us, and I hope we’ll stay united behind them.