THR Illustration / Image: David McNew/Getty Images
A historic Hollywood labor battle will soon be over.
The 148-day writers’ strike, the second longest in Writers Guild of America history, will conclude on 12:01 am PT Wednesday thanks to a vote from guild leadership that officially authorized some 11,500 members to return to work. Tasks that for months were prohibited by strike rules — pitching, selling scripts, taking meetings, responding to notes — will then be sanctioned, while writers’ rooms can reconvene.
“This allows writers to return to work during the ratification process, but does not affect the membership’s right to make a final determination on contract approval,” the WGA negotiating committee stated.
Studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and the union finally announced the tentative agreement on a new three-year contract on Sunday night after a full weekend of work on the deal. After about a month where talks were at a standstill, progress accelerated starting Sept. 20, when the two sides got back to the bargaining table at the AMPTP’s Sherman Oaks headquarters with major industry leaders (Disney’s Bob Iger, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley) attending. With top leaders in the room, the studios made changes to their position on issues like minimum staffing in television writers’ rooms and rewarding writers for the success of projects on streaming. Regulations on artificial intelligence proved to be a lasting sticking point, but the two sides eventually came to a compromise by Sunday night. In its communication to members about the agreement on Sunday, the WGA called the resulting agreement “exceptional.”
On Tuesday, the WGA West board and the WGA East council approved the deal, which set in motion the vote to end the restraining order against AMPTP member companies.
The news brings to an end one half of a historic labor standoff in entertainment: SAG-AFTRA still remains out on strike, and neither that union nor the AMPTP have announced any new bargaining dates for the parties yet. The two sides still remain deadlocked on issues of general wage increases, a proposal to give union members a cut of platform subscriber revenue when their streaming projects succeed and regulations on artificial intelligence, among other issues. Even with the writers back at work, production cannot resume in any meaningful way without principal performers.
