Looks like we’ll find out on Sunday or Monday what the terms are.  I expect that it will be a version of the DGA/WGA/AFTRA deal, and I also expect that some kind of compromise has been reached on the terminus.

Everything else is fairly predictable as well. The SAG militants will characterize the deal as slightly worse than the Holocaust, and it will be ratified anyway by a pragmatic membership who will appreciate the immediate improvements the deal brings them.

The question of what SAG’s militants have squandered, though, will linger. They may have permanently screwed themselves out of jurisdiction over all television programming…making their comparisons to the rarely-triggered $20,000 network rerun residuals even more inapt.

Stay tuned.

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My next article is going to be about the WGA’s financial crunch, how it’s changing the way our Guild runs and functions, how it’s reflecting a new direction for the Guild’s primary purpose (not for the better, in my opinion), and what’s going to have to happen to avoid an unpleasant and unproductive future for our union.

But as they say, past is prologue.

About four years ago, in the spring of 2005, a political movement called “Writers United” coalesced around the leadership of Patric Verrone.  WU was the new face of the old militant wing of the union, which had previously been shepherded by David Rintels.  Their attitude wasn’t anything new:  the union had to be more confrontational with the companies in order for us to succeed, and anything smacking of “caving” or conceding needed to be burned away.

Their rhetoric, however, was different.  Different, and politically brilliant.  Rather than trotting out the old banner of “let’s throw a strike” and singing the lyrics of The Internationale, Patric and Writers United did the opposite.  In fact, had I not been in Guild politics at the time, I’m sure I would have voted for them.  They insisted that they were the anti-strike party, and that they were in possession of a sure-fire technique that would bring us victory without firing a single shot.

In the fall of ’05, their slate was swept into office.  That day, I turned to a friend and said, “We’re going on strike.”

Might have been a lucky guess.  Or maybe listening to Patric and his cohorts for a year in the boardroom had convinced me of this for good reason.  It’s not that I thought then (or think now) that they were lying to us.  No.  I think they believed what they said.

They were just wrong.

A friend was kind enough to archive much of their campaign material. Here are some excerpts of their promises and positions from 2005.

The big WU promise was that they offered an alternative to “strike or cave.”  Very smart.  Portray the negotiations of 2001 and 2004 as “caving” (even though they were actually tremendously successful in real dollar terms), and then insist that even though Writers United looked like wolves, they were really just smart, rational chickens.

From Vice-Presidential candidate David Weiss:

I’m categorically opposed to striking in the current market. Striking only makes sense when doing so presents MAJOR pressure on a winnable issue against your opponent. We don’t control enough of the market at this time to effectively do that. 

Well, absolutely nothing changed in terms of our control of the market between 2005 and 2007.  Nor did they ever find an issue upon which to apply major pressure, or minor pressure or even just noticeable pressure.  They thought product integration could be that issue, but it wasn’t. Not even close. Zero traction.

Lacking both control of the market and a pressure point, Weiss voted to strike anyway. Even though he was categorically opposed to it.

Patric Verrone continued that anti-strike “Hey, I don’t wanna strike…no way!” line of rhetoric in his candidate statement.

Nonunion writing has had a direct effect on the demand for union work, depressing wages and negatively impacting benefits. An hour of air time devoted to a network prime time reality show or a cable documentary on sharks is an hour of programming that did not pay into our pension and health funds or pay a residual. An animated or independent film that screens at the multiplex and ultimately fills the video store shelf does so instead of a WGA film that would have contributed to our benefit plans and paid a DVD royalty.

The effect on our bargaining power in negotiations is even more stark. Without market penetration, we are a toothless dog. We can growl and bark but, when the time comes to strike, our bite is almost meaningless. We experienced that phenomenon directly last year during MBA negotiations when the companies literally dared us to strike, knowing that they could mount a fall television season filled with reality programming without us. 

Well, that’s what Patric thought in 2005.  Did our toothless caninity stop him from throwing us all at the companies anyway?  No.

As it turns out (happily), he was wrong.  It’s not market penetration and sheer numbers that add power to a strike.  It’s the quality and desirability of the members you represent. Has he learned this lesson?  Unfortunately, no.  We still spend absurd amounts of money trying to organize reality television.

Ah, organizing. The magic bullet! First, from our 2005 wayback machine, it’s Vice-President David Weiss on how much we should spend on organizing.

A national think-tank for a progressive arm of the AFL-CIO states that effective unions should be allocating upwards of 30% of their budgets for organizing. Mr. Young’s department — the virtual R&D of our union’s future — is operating on a paltry 3% — even with the doubling I mentioned above. 

According to the Guild’s latest numbers, after nearly four years of Verrone and Weiss at the helm of our union, organizing now accounts for about 5% of the union’s budget. Oh well. But hey, at least the Writers United slate promised on their website that increasing our organizing budget wouldn’t really cost us anything!

Surplus monies from the General Fund and dues from new members will get us to our goals while ensuring that no member services will be cut.

Isn’t that neat?  Organizing will bring in new members, new members will pay dues, and the whole thing PAYS FOR ITSELF!

You can almost hear the Sham Wow guy’s voice pitching that one.

But…what actually happened?

Four years later, we’re in our second consecutive year of financial deficits, and while the Organizing Department refuses to shrink, we just lost four staffers from the already understaffed Credits Department (which serves all of us who go through credit arbitrations).  We laid off Paul Nawrocky, whose sole job was to oversee member services.  Doesn’t look like we’ll be replacing him anytime soon. We also cut people from the legal department, so our already shaky ability to enforce the gains you and I strike for has gotten shakier yet.

Meanwhile, Jeff Hermanson, the $150,000 pamphleteer, retains his ever-so-important job.

As for paying for itself, well…the very small handful of cable writers we’ve organized since 2004 don’t make the requisite $200,000,000 required to offset the expenditures Writers United have made.

Speaking of reality…

The Writers United delusion was essentially this:  we can’t get a good deal without a serious strike threat, and we can’t have a serious strike threat without controlling reality television.

At the time, my argument to Patric and the rest of Writers United was this: we will always have a serious strike threat if our bigshots are sufficiently horrified by the companies’ offer (as we were in 2001), and even if that weren’t true, we were never ever ever ever going to get reality television in the manner Writers United wanted…industry-wide, all at once, with a union standards clause.  We could run corporate campaigns and protest in the streets all we wanted. We could sacrifice babies and pray to Cthulu.  Wasn’t…ever…gonna…happen.

The Writers United reality delusion was beautiful encapsulated in their website manifesto (my emphasis added):

We will set quantifiable goals for current membership involvement and new member recruitment. The current reality organizing drive, if fully committed to, can have all reality writers covered by the WGA within a few months. We can have the majority of cable TV writers in animation, nonfiction, and comedy-variety by our next negotiation in 2007. Similar gains can be made in new media, games, and independent film.  Let’s set the goal, allocate the resources, and hold ourselves accountable. 

Wow.

They really did believe this.  I don’t know why.  I don’t know why they chose, en masse, to ignore history, circumstance, leverage, law, economics and psychology.

First, let’s agree that we can check off the “if fully committed to” box.  From September ’05 continuing to this very day, they have had a complete majority of the Board and officerships.  They fired the former E.D. and elevated their handpicked successor.  They controlled the policy and the budget.

They did not have all reality writers covered by the WGA within a few months.

They had none of them.  We still have none of them.

It’s been four years.  And we’re still spending money on this strategy, which is a fiasco in terms of results and yes, purpose. The entire reason they wanted reality writers in the first place has been disproven. And yet, the money keeps getting shoveled into the fire…

Did we get the majority of cable, animation, nonfiction and comedy-variety writers by 2007?

No. Not even close. We got a couple of cable shows and a couple of comedy-variety shows, but we’re nowhere near a majority.  Not even in the same galaxy. And animation? Time’s pretty much stood still on that one. Zero progress.

New media? We did okay there…that was the one emerging market that could be defined from the bottom floor up.  But games?  Zippo. I tried to get the Guild to help out and organize one game shop.  They blew it (in my humble opinion).

Were we lied to?

No.  We were religioned. We were fed faith and zeal and easy answers.

But do the architects of this religious experiment finally get that the messiah isn’t coming to shower us all with better DVD residuals?

I wonder.

It’s that last line of their platform that intrigues me the most.

Let’s set the goal,

They did.

allocate the resources,

They really, really did.

and hold ourselves accountable. 

Aaaaand FAIL.

After nearly four years of this stuff, the uberstrategy of Writers United is still a failure.  We haven’t organized reality television, cable, video games or animation. We have no more market penetration than we did when they started.  We’ve spent millions, and now we’ve slashed our budget and cut into the very departments that serve us…the members who actually earn income and pay dues…all in the name of adventuresome nonsense like funding “workcations” to Puerto Rico to impotently protest American Idol.

So if Writers United’s big platform promises were:

No striking or caving

and

Organizing reality TV

and

Paying for itself

…then I think it’s time to hold them accountable and say that they failed, they failed and then they failed again.

Next up, what this means for us going forward as a union, and how the culture of “staying the course” is going to hurt us all in very real, pocketbook ways.

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