WGA Strike At Day 50: Major Hollywood Unions To Join Big L.A. March Tomorrow As Economic Impact Mounts

Editor’s note: Part 2 of two-part series about the writers strike crossing the 50-day mark.

The 50-day-old Writers Guild strike has now reached the halfway point of the guild’s 100-day strike of 2007-08, and tomorrow it will be one-third as long as the 153-day strike of 1988 – the longest in the guild’s history.

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By the guild’s own reckoning, the strike has already cost the California economy $1.5 billion ($30 million a day) in lost economic output – which is already more than the $1.287 billion in gains ($429 million a year) it says its proposals would cost the companies.

On Wednesday, the guild will suspend picketing for the day in Los Angeles to stage a “March and Rally for a Fair Contract,” which kicks off at 10 am at Pan Pacific Park and ends at the La Brea Tar Pits, where representatives from the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, the Directors Guild, IATSE, the Teamsters and the American Federation of Musicians will speak to striking writers and their supporters.

RELATED: Independent Films Unblocked: SAG-AFTRA Waivers Would Let Some Productions Work Through A Strike

In a message to guild members today, WGA negotiating committee member Yahlin Chang said that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers “is looking to dismantle the writers’ room as we know it. They claim that you don’t need writing staff during production and that writing doesn’t happen in post. Well, as anyone who’s ever written for a TV show or knows how a TV show gets made knows, that is flat out false.

“Once an episode goes into prep and your production team comes back and says you’re a million dollars over budget, only writers can figure out how to consolidate scenes and do the rewriting necessary to keep the integrity of the story. And the lie that ‘writing doesn’t happen in post’ is how the companies have gotten away with forcing showrunners to work in post for free and for below minimum. 

“When you sit in post, you have before you a hundred different versions of the story you could tell, and choosing that version is writing. All those moments that you ensure happen on set and in the editing room create story, and creating stories is writing, whatever form it takes.  

“The degradation of writers’ working conditions and wages is unsustainable. We already know this and quite frankly, the entire town does too. It is precisely what the Guild is fighting to change with the proposals we have on the table.  

“The destruction of the writers’ room will undermine our union and threaten our health and pension plans. We need to secure stability for the current membership as well as generations of writers coming up after us.”

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