David Simon, creator of 'The Wire' and 'The Plot Against America,' has weighed in on an issue that threatens to tear the WGA East apart: what to do about the guild’s rapidly growing contingent of digital news writers?
. His slate includes the WGA East’s future president Michael Winship, vice president Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and secretary-treasurer Chris Kyle – all of whom are running unopposed. Voting in the Council elections begins on Thursday and concludes on September 14.Homicide: Life on the Street
1) Sit down with representatives of our digital members and create a bifurcated union that allows both sides the necessary measure of self-governance and control over commensurate resources so that the WGAE can thrive as an amalgamated union. “And strikes of such duration can require significant reserves for strike funds and medical-coverage subsidies. It is almost a willful failure of imagination to assert that for an amalgamated union, there isn’t a horizon event at which a governing council is asked to choose between delivering millions to weather a lengthy job action and delivering those same millions to continue organizing new shops or bargaining for new contracts in other sectors.
Until such time as I was goaded to stand for election to the Writer’s Guild of America East’s governing council, I never actually voted in my union’s elections. I pride myself on being an educated voter and dropping the lever on the right people, and to be entirely honest, I went through my first two decades in the WGAE without the slightest clue of who was who in my union leadership or what anyone stood for.
This time the insurgent slate is comprised of candidates for council who support the idea of continued organization of digital journalism shops and even traditional print journalism units under the WGAE umbrella – to the point at which the union is no longer the primary representative of screen and television writers in the east, but rather an amalgamated union of writers, some of whom write primarily for the screen and some who do not.
If the council as a whole hasn’t been transparent about the stakes involved with the membership, the leadership of the digital contingent has been at least equally opaque with those members in its camp.
The resistance to those efforts by the WGAE has always centered on our claim that while we shared the same mission as the WGAW, we represented cadres of writing, such as comedy-variety, non-fiction film and TV work, as well as East Coast-based production, that were better served and addressed than if they were subsumed into the larger West unit.
Among WGAE councilmembers, much hope was placed in the work of that four-member group. As digital membership in the WGAE reached 25 percent, with another 11 percent expected to be added in the coming year, the council leadership realized last year that the rapid success of the organizing campaign was about to transform the union in ways that would begin a West Coast exodus.
The failure of the working group to solve the problem left the union’s executive director staring at the horizon with no other alternative than to pause the organizing campaign until the issue of structure and governance was resolved.
Telling our digital brothers and sisters no for the first time and having the rapid organizational effort paused has not only divided the WGAE council, it has led to competing slates and an election fight for the union’s future.
But of course that five-year period contained no strike by the WGA. The last such job action, in 2007-08, went for 14 weeks. The previous battle with the studios and networks, in 1988, went 22 weeks. Enduring strikes of such duration are part and parcel of the WGA’s strength and a fixed necessity, given that the studios and networks often can’t be brought back to the negotiating table until they’ve burned off a season or more of already-in-the-can programming.
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