As most of you know by now, the Writers Guild of America officially announced that it has reached a deal with Big Media to bring an end to its strike. That happened over the weekend (and yours truly has tried to stick to a no-weekend blogging rule for sanity sake) so I thought I’d catch up with the details and what it means for the future.

    I actually want to start with the future. The strike was a success because, despite the media’s attempt to try to portray all sorts of imagined divisions, this was an incredibly unified strike. Sure, there were people who disagreed. But you simply don’t get hundreds of people to continue to show up to a picket line three months into a strike–as happened this past Thursday in front of the Time Warner building in NYC (maybe reporters like Michael Cieply of The New York Times should get off their asses and actually visit the picket lines on a regular basis)–if there are deep divisions in the union. The Big Media bosses underestimated the ability of the WGA to hold people together.

    But, here’s the point about the unity and solidarity–the day after the ratification of the contract deal has to be the first day in the WGA’s efforts to build towards the next fight when the contract expires in three years. There is tremendous unity now–but, before that energy dissipates, it would behoove the union to figure out how to capture that unity now and build moving forward. I’m not suggesting that capturing the energy of a strike is a simple issue–people want to go back to work and get on with life. But the progress made in the contract fight this time–and there was progress–will only be judged, I think, a long-term success in 5 or 10 years.

    For example, you may remember that the Guild, much to the leadership’s disappointment, took off the bargaining table a demand that the Guild’s jurisdiction be extended to reality television, which is currently not covered under the contract. Therein lies the tough fight of the future–growing the union’s jurisdiction in non-union areas, which Big Media would like to expand. The Guild have to be able to show that organizing new members and broadening the reach of the union is critical to keeping the union’s power what it is–and being able to bargain with strength ten and twenty years down the road. The industry wants to move  to a lower-cost structure. You have the world of the WGA, where the standards are decent, with wages, health care and pensions. And, then, you have Big Mediastan–that would be the world where there is no union, where there are no residuals, no pensions, no health care.

    So, now some questions, answers and opinions about the deal (you can read a summary of the agreement yourself):

    Is the strike over? Well, we’ll see. The bargaining committee and the executives boards of the two wings of the Guild have recommended that the deal be accepted. Tomorrow, members will be asked to vote on whether to end the strike–that is, stop picketing pending ratification of the agreement (darn, and now what will I do if I can’t see Tom, Susannah, David and the rest of my peeps on the line?). From what I could gather from the conversations I had with folks at the Guild’s East Coast awards dinner Saturday night, people are going to vote in favor of ending the strike and going back to work, as early as Wednesday (as one or two people joked on the picket line the other day–and they were joking–"you mean, we’d have to go back and work again?"…ahhhh, writers). There would, then, be a 10-day notice given before the contract itself was sent out for ratification, with pro- and con- statements included in the ballot.

    Did the writers win? Well, winning is always relative. Nobody gets everything they want in a strike. But, I think it’s definitely the case that, without a strike, the writers would not have made the progress they made. Remember, six months ago, the Big Media negotiators laid out a whole set of roll-backs in pay, pension and health benefits and their answer to any Internet-based compensation was Nikita-like: Nyet. Now, the writers have a deal that includes residuals for Internet use, WGA jurisdiction over the Internet work, the inclusion of "distributor’s gross language" (which, in the world of Big Media accountants who perform the magic of disappearing money so that nothing seems to ever make money, is big),  and other improvements.

    So, is there something to complain about? The biggest point of debate right now is the so-called "initial streaming window". The deal says that in the first 17 days of the streaming of the program on the Internet there is no residual. Some folks think that that gives aways the very days that the show is most valuable; others say that no one knows when the most value of Internet-streaming occurs since the business is developing and that the most important fact is setting the precedent that residuals will be paid–which the industry had resisted. The WGA did a bit better than the Directors Guild in that in the third year of the contract the residual payment will be calculated based on 2 percent of the distributor’s gross–meaning, the gross money that is paid to the distributor of the television show.

    I’d guess that what is important here is the toe-hold and the precedent. And the toe-hold only gets to expand to a foothold and maybe even a place to put the whole body if the union builds, as I said earlier, on the current mobilization of the members.

    There is also a toe-hold in download sales: basically, the writers will be paid, up to a point, roughly what they are paid for DVD sales–which was a figure that was not considered sufficient (and is left over from the forced-down-their-throats deal in the 1980s contract over videocassettes). Once the number of downloads goes over a certain number, the residuals are paid on the distributor’s gross at less than double the initial rate. Still, quite modest–and room for improvement three years from now.

    The increase in traditional money is modest: minimum rates went up modestly (and not enough, in my opinion, to keep pace with the real cost of living).

    The Guild did win explicit recognition that it is the "exclusive bargaining agent" for writing for new media. The worry I would have is that the threshold for WGA-covered work is for budgets above $15,000 a minute, $300,000 per program or $500,000 per series. The question is: does that encourage BigMediastan to drive down costs on productions to get under these minimums? Something to watch for.

    Bottom line: I still think the strike was important. While some might view the successes as modest, the real test will be how the Guild builds on this contract, if it is approved by the members. Of course, there could be an uprising in the ranks in the next few days that sends people back to the picket lines and the leadership back to the negotiating table to get more. If that was to happen, I doubt we’d see a deal for many more weeks.

    Two other thoughts: Whether they want to admit or not, the Directors Guild got their deal thanks to the WGA members walking the picket lines.

     And why is that the media has never held the CEOs responsible for the strike? The dollars and cents of what was agreed to is relatively small in this multi-billion business, where CEO salaries are massive. Despite the media’s sucking up to the CEOs, the public got that this was a fight between extremely rich, greedy CEOs and people trying to just make a middle-class living–from the outset, the public supported the strikers which is always the case in a strike.

    Next up: The Screen Actors Guild. Some thoughts on that down the road.

    The best thing, from a New Yorker’s perspective, for anyone like yours truly who spent many hours in the cold, sleet, and rain, is that this contract expires in May 2011–so, during the next strike, we can work on our tans.