The Netflix building in Hollywood, California.
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Writers Fire Back at Studios’ Flawed Counteroffer: ‘Pay Your Workers’
Hollywood studios and streaming services released details of an offer they’d made to the Writers Guild of America that included updated terms on AI, data transparency and minimum staffing, according to a Tuesday press release. But upon further review of Hollywood’s counteroffer, members of the WGA don’t plan on leaving the picket lines anytime soon.
“Our priority is to end the strike so that valued members of the creative community can return to what they do best and to end the hardships that so many people and businesses that service the industry are experiencing,” wrote the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers president Carol Lombardini in a press release.
After an invitation, the writers’ union met with the AMPTP Tuesday evening with the hope of bargaining for a fair deal. When offered the same counterproposal from Aug. 11, the writers’ negotiating committee stated the meeting was designed to “get us to cave” and that the offer failed to protect writers from “existential threats.” Rolling Stone spoke with union members who say the repeat offer is not surprising and will not discourage them from keeping up the fight.
“We told them that a strike has a price, and that price is an answer to all — and not just some — of the problems they have created in the business,” wrote the WGA negotiating committee Tuesday.
Jonterri Gadson, a comedy writer and union member since 2019, compared the AMPTP’s negotiating tactics to a training she experienced while she served in the Army Reserves in South Carolina: The drill sergeant would taunt them with an imaginary finish line. Once soldiers would reach the anticipated end goal, the drill sergeant would shout for them to keep going.
Gadson says that she felt utter excitement when they resumed bargaining on Aug. 11, the 102nd day of the WGA strike. What felt like the beginning of the end now feels like a manipulative tactic, she contends.
“They’re making it out to seem like our leadership, our negotiating committee, isn’t willing to move forward when this was the first counteroffer they’ve done,” Gadson, who is also a Writers Guild Board of Directors candidate, says.
They’re making it out to seem like our leadership, our negotiating committee, isn’t willing to move forward when this was the first counteroffer they’ve done.
AI protections, weekly pay for feature writers and minimum staffing are among Gadson’s top priorities. In the released proposal, the AMPTP highlighted a 13% wage increase over a three-year contract, a 15% increase in minimum weekly rates, and AI protections that safeguard writers’ compensation, credit, and rights from AI-produced material, but left open a potential loophole that could lead to copyrightable scripts produced by AI with human help (since a judge recently ruled scripts that are solely AI-produced are not copyrightable).
The proposal also notes data transparency, such as providing quarterly reports of viewership data on streaming shows, along with worldwide residual increases and a minimum of 10 weeks employment for all writers.
A WGA memo released Thursday, however, highlighted a number of areas where in their eyes, AMPTPs proposal fell short, such as minimum staffing for writers’ rooms, AI, and transparency when it comes to streaming viewership data:
- In television, the companies have introduced the notion of an MBA guarantee of minimum staff size and duration. But the loopholes, limitations, and omissions in their modest proposal, too numerous to single out, make them effectively toothless.
- We have had real discussions and seen movement on their part regarding AI protections. But we are not yet where we need to be. As one example, they continue to refuse to regulate the use of our work to train AI to write new content for a motion picture.
- Finally, the companies say they have made a major concession by offering to allow six WGA staff to study limited streaming viewership data for the next three years, so we can return in 2026 to ask once again for a viewership-based residual. In the meantime, no writer can be told by the WGA about how well their project is doing, much less receive a residual based on that data.
The Wire creator David Simon slammed the AMPTP’s counterproposal on Twitter, writing, “Read it in detail. On every one of five essential issues for which the AMPTP claims a concession in large print, there is, in smaller print, an equivocation that wipes the concession away. It’s why this ‘final offer’ isn’t remotely acceptable to our union.”
The issue of fair compensation, meanwhile, hits Gadson close to home. She was offered a low-ranking position to write on a Paramount+ show, after being in the industry for three years, and was given a better offer only after threatening to walk away.
“That discounts the six or seven other rooms I’ve been in,” Gadson says, “as if my experience didn’t matter.”
Like Gadson, Tian Jun Gu, a TV writer and WGA East council member, has a shared interest in AI protections, along with minimum staff levels in writers’ rooms. Adequately staffed writers’ rooms prevent burnout in production and post production, as well as creates a foundation for the next generation of writers.
Gu, who has worked on Netflix’s House of Cards and Fox’s Monarch, says the industry needs to invest in the creatives powering the scripts, rather than “putting a band-aid on things and stopping the bleeding.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, NBCUniversal Chairman Donna Langley, and Lombardini were all in attendance. Lombardini wrote in the Tuesday press release that she hoped the WGA would work alongside them in ending the strike. And Sarandos, who’s repeatedly invoked how he was raised in a union household, shared the “enormous toll” a strike adds on a family’s financial and emotional stability during a Netflix earnings call in July, even though his company is largely responsible for the current inequitable industry climate.
David Slack, a TV writer and former WGA negotiating committee member, argues the 117-day strike will only reach an end once writers receive a truly fair deal.
“There’s no better investment than a hit movie in terms of return on investment,” Slack says, “And yet they grind the very people who make that product at every opportunity as hard as they can. And the only thing that stops them is organized labor.”
Slack, who got his start writing for Teen Titans and Law & Order, says he was part of the thousands of Hollywood writers who fired their agents in 2019 over conflict-of-interest claims. After battles in the courtrooms and bad-behavior accusations, the WGA won. He’s still fighting; this time against Hollywood studios and streamers, and is asking executives to give writers a bigger piece of the pie.
“You go out to dinner with a bunch of people and the richest guy at the table starts making all these excuses and playing all these games about why he can’t pick up his share of the check,” Slack says. “Just pay your workers.”