Following the last meeting between the two parties, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced that the new offer from The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) failed to address all their concerns.
The AMPTP recently changed its offer to include new details on critical issues such as compensation, minimum staffing, residual payments, and restrictions on artificial intelligence. According to the latest proposal, the WGA will get a compounded 13% pay increase over the three-year contract, and AI-generated written content will not be considered “literary material.” The streaming platforms also offered to provide the WGA, which represents around 11.500 film and television writers, with the total number of hours viewed for each made-for-streaming show in confidential quarterly reports.
“We have come to the table with an offer that meets the priority concerns the writers have expressed. We are deeply committed to ending the strike and are hopeful that the WGA will work toward the same resolution,” declared Carol Lombardini, President of the AMPTP.
However, the vision of the WGA Negotiating Committee is quite different. “On Monday of this week, we received an invitation to meet with Bob Iger, Donna Langley, Ted Sarandos, David Zaslav, and Carol Lombardini. It was accompanied by a message that it was past time to end this strike and that the companies were finally ready to bargain for a deal. We accepted that invitation and, in good faith, met tonight, in hopes that the companies were serious about getting the industry back to work. Instead, on the 113th day of the strike – and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side - we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was,” WGA said in a statement.
“We explained all the ways in which their counter’s limitations and loopholes and omissions failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place. 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. But this was not a meeting to make a deal. This was a meeting to get us to cave, which is why, not twenty minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals. This was the companies’ plan from the beginning – not to bargain, but to jam us. It is their only strategy – to bet that we will turn on each other,” the WGA added.