After months of on-and-off negotiation talks, the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached a tentative agreement to end the nearly 150-day-long writers strike. The WGA and AMPTP are currently in the process of drafting the final contract language. (Salon's unionized employees are represented by the WGA East.)
"What we have won in this contract — most particularly, everything we have gained since May 2nd — is due to the willingness of this membership to exercise its power, to demonstrate its solidarity, to walk side-by-side, to endure the pain and uncertainty of the past 146 days," the WGA negotiation committee wrote in a letter to members Sunday night. "It is the leverage generated by your strike, in concert with the extraordinary support of our union siblings, that finally brought the companies back to the table to make a deal."
Details of the WGA's agreement will be released once the final language is complete, per Variety. As for next steps, the WGA negotiating committee will vote Tuesday on "whether to recommend the agreement and send it on to the WGAW Board and WGAE Council for approval." An additional vote by the committee could lift the strike "restraining order" and allow members to "return to work during the ratification vote." Hollywood writers are still on strike as they await the results of those votes, but all picketing is hereby suspended, the WGA said.
The guild has also asked that their members not return to work until SAG-AFTRA also reached a new agreement with the AMPTP. The ongoing actors strike, which began on July 14, coincided with the writers strike as members of the Screen Actors Guild took issue with a series of Hollywood labor disputes. In the same vein as WGA members, SAG-AFTRA members are seeking a new contract between the union and the AMPTP, higher base compensation and stricter regulations against studio usage of artificial intelligence.
