Understanding collective bargaining and the Hollywood double strike

When will it end? Since May, picketers have lined the streets of Los Angeles, braving the record-breaking heat to voice their disenchantment with the contract terms offered by the big Hollywood studios as their unions’ collective bargaining agreements expired. The stakes could not be higher, covering disagreements on age-old issues like fair compensation and modern issues like fair use of artificial intelligence. Following a summer packed with high-grossing films and more to come before year’s end, studios may be feeling little pressure to make concessions now. But next summer is right around the corner, and Indie projects will be unable to buoy the industry – and the unions’ members – much longer. The good news for moviegoers and binge-watching couch surfers is that a confluence of these factors and others, both within and without the collective bargaining process, will lead the parties to agree on a new contract sooner rather than later.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is comprised of two separate unions, one based in New York and the other in Los Angeles. Under the WGA umbrella, these two unions collectively represent and collaborate to negotiate contracts for approximately 20,000 writers in film, television, radio and online media across the country. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Studio Artists, or “SAG-AFTRA,” represents the other major subset of workers in Hollywood, with its 160,000 members – including journeymen performers and crew. Members of both unions, of course, regularly work for studios and other mainstays of Hollywood, which are themselves represented in union negotiations by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).

The benefits, wages and working conditions of the unions’ members relative to the AMPTP are governed primarily by their collective bargaining agreements. The CBA between the WGA and the AMPTP expired on May 1, 2023, and, without agreement on the aforementioned terms, the WGA and roughly 11,500 of its members went on strike against the AMPTP. The SAG-AFTRA CBA expired months later in mid-July, similarly without consensus, leading SAG-AFTRA to strike. What followed has become one of the longest strikes in the industry and only the second time the two unions have gone on strike simultaneously.

During the strike, affected members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are prohibited from, among other things laid out in their respective “Strike Orders,” working for AMPTP-related productions. Those members working in broadcast TV, radio, streaming news, online media, nonfiction podcasts, nonfiction TV, and public TV fall outside the scope of the Strike Orders as enumerated in, among other things, SAG-AFTRA’s Notice Regarding Non-Struck Work. With struck work constituting the majority of work done by the affected writers, performers and crew constituting, they are, as a practical matter, left to join the picket line or look for work elsewhere—but not anywhere.

In an effort to provide alternate avenues for members to continue working and paying their bills, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have offered qualifying productions the ability to submit applications for “Interim Agreements.” Interim Agreements are form agreements, also referred to as “waivers,” prepared by the unions which allow approved and independently produced and financed productions with no direct connection to the AMPTP to continue filming or casting with affected union members for the duration of the strike. To date, hundreds of such productions have applied for and been granted Interim Agreements.

However, the influx of applications and approvals is likely to wane. On Aug. 14, SAG-AFTRA announced that, in supposed solidarity with the WGA, it will now also exclude from Interim Agreements any WGA-covered productions being produced, or to be produced, in the United States. Thus, many of the productions that may have previously qualified for an Interim Agreement have now been cut out.

Moreover, despite the perceived boons of the Interim Agreements (particularly in the eyes of those on strike), the Interim Agreements are far from universally praised. Indeed, is a subject of intense discord within the industry’s ranks. Some, like prominent comedian Sarah Silverman in an expletive-laden rant, have slammed the Interim Agreements and the members taking advantage of them, claiming they are undermining the cause (also known as “scabbing”), and believe that these Indie productions will eventually be sold to the very studios, with the same purportedly objectionable terms, that the unions are now striking against.

For the time being, the strike continues. But the unions are far from “holding all the cards.” Though the right to strike may be among the most visible economic weapons now on stage, it is only one of many available to unions and employers alike to induce one party to come to the terms desired by the other – though such must always be utilized in good faith. As the United States Supreme Court proclaimed more than 60 years ago, true today as ever before, these economic devices “exist side by side” with “the necessity to bargain in good faith,” and while “[i]nitially it may be only fear of the economic consequences of disagreement that turns the parties to facts, reason, a sense of responsibility, a responsiveness to government and public opinion, and moral principle,” these forces in time “generate their own compulsions, and negotiating a contract approaches the ideal of informed persuasion.”

And, as for compulsions, there are arguably none quite like the demand of the American consumer. Many, like actress Julianne Lewis, believe that the conditions shaped by the Interim Agreements are ideal for an “Indie movie Renaissance.” While that may be so, and Indie films unquestionably have a special place in cinema, there is no substitute for the blockbuster, and it will only be so long before a baying mob of moviegoers arrive at Hollywood’s door, desperate to satisfy their seemingly insatiable appetite for big-budget explosions and vast worlds draped in pink.

So have faith and trust the time-tested process that is collective bargaining. It may seem like there is no end in sight, but these forces will ultimately and naturally bring the parties to a middle ground. While unquestionably difficult, it is certainly not a “mission: impossible.”