Writers Guild Leaders on Where Deal Landed With AI, How Gains and Concessions Were Made

As of Wednesday, the 148-day 2023 writers strike — a bold attempt to reshape the business for scribes from Hollywood’s most audacious union — is officially over.

The sprawling tentative agreement that brought an end to the historic work stoppage was reached on Sept. 24 after Writers Guild of America negotiators and some of the industry’s top leaders had been in talks for days on the new three-year contract. Though it’s still subject to member ratification to take effect, the deal addresses a wide array of union priorities like setting minimum staffing for writers rooms, putting in place guardrails on the use of AI, and rewarding writers if their projects pop on streaming services.

So how did the pact come together? In an interview on Tuesday night, the union’s negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser and union president Meredith Stiehm offered their take, noting that once four top executives — Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos — entered the room on Sept. 20, the parties took only days to come to terms. Stiehm and Keyser also discussed the biggest hurdles to productive negotiations, where both sides made concessions, and what the WGA may want to fight for in the next contract negotiation, three years from now.

How do you feel at this moment, now that you’ve taken this big step toward ending the Writers Guild of America’s second-longest strike in history?

Meredith Stiehm: Relieved and happy and proud. It’s been a very long road, and I’m proud of this membership for hanging in there and this NegCom [negotiating committee] for staying with it, and we really got the deal we feel like we held out for and writers needed.

What were the significant turning points in the negotiation, in your view, that led to real progress?

Chris Keyser: Well, first of all, I would say there’s one thing that wasn’t a turning point but was consistent all the way through, which was the membership solidarity and the commitment to solving these problems that we’d said from the very beginning were existential for us and that we could not leave this contract negotiation without a solution for, so that’s the first thing. The second thing was SAG going out on strike. The AMPTP’s strategy of isolating the WGA and driving us toward pattern [deals] failed. And SAG said, “No, we also have existential issues and we need to be accounted for.” Once two out of three guilds said that, it was clear that their strategy had failed. At that point, it became inevitable that the companies were going to have to come back to the table and make a deal that solved our problems. By the way, we can talk about this later, but we have to do the same for SAG, so let me start with that.

Meredith, is there anything else you want to add there — maybe any turning points in the negotiating room as well?

Stiehm: Well, I mean, looking back, kind of zooming out at the whole 148 days, it became very clear that the AMPTP process was not functional and that it was really a failed process to have spent so much time with them and working with them, and they have sort of old strategies that they’ve been using for decades. So the actual turning point came when CEOs decided they were serious and they were going to come and be in the room and spend five days knocking it out and really negotiating — and then we got it done.

What were the biggest hurdles and stumbling blocks to making the deal?

Keyser: I mean, it’s sort of a version of the same question. The first thing was the need at some point for the AMPTP process, which is more or less a process of saying “no” to labor, to give way to a conversation between the companies, particularly their CEOs — us first, and then SAG — that dealt seriously with the problems that the changes in the business were causing for members, and made it seem to us to be impossible for writers to have ongoing careers in the business. So that’s the single most important challenge, was to move from the AMPTP, knowing that it always tries to put downward pressure on wages and working conditions, to a real conversation with the companies where they understood that they needed to treat this seriously. There were challenges that came out of the fact that the business has changed so much, that so much was necessary to protect writers, that the companies needed to be able to come to terms with things they had never thought about talking about before: everything from second drafts for screenwriters to MBA terms in streaming for Appendix A, to the protection of the writers room, to transparency and money for programs that perform particularly well on streaming, and also protections against AI. Those were all meaningful challenges because they are all entirely new concepts, most of them, in the MBA. As were other things we gained, like script fees for staff writers and pension protection for teams. So in some ways, the inertial process of the AMPTP and the desires for the companies mostly to give us less and not more had to give way to an understanding that the business was changing, and so the MBA had to change as well. It took a lot of time, but we got there.

When it comes to AI regulations, can you explain whether or not writers’ scripts can be used to train the technology?

Keyser: Sure. Well, first of all, I would say there are two different kinds of AI protections that we negotiated here. First of all, we negotiated all kinds of protections for writers’ workflow going forward, in the way that AI can intersect with that, where we protected writers’ rights and their credits and their compensation and their separated rights, the ways in which AI is not literary material under the terms of the MBA. So that’s hugely important. Then we had to deal with the question of what happens when companies want to use our material to train AI. What we said there is this: First of all, the companies have, they claim, some ongoing copyright rights in using our material, and we claim certain contractual rights that limit that or would compensate us for that. What we’ve said is we are going to retain all of those rights, given the fact that no one yet knows what the world is going to look like or what that use might be, and that will be figured out in time in the instances in which the companies actually do want to use our material to train. In other words, instead of trying to negotiate beforehand a world we don’t understand, we retained every single right we have to negotiate for writers, and writers retain every single right they have both under the law and the MBA to protect themselves in circumstances of the companies using our material to train.

Interesting. So TBD, is that what that means?

Keyser: Not just TBD — I mean yes, TBD in a sense, because we don’t know what the details of the negotiations will be, but it’s critically important that we retain all of our rights, that we have ongoing rights in our material, contractual rights for the companies, that we are not giving up. There’s no, “We’ll talk about it and you can tell us later what you’re going to pay us.” That’s not what we did. We said, “The rights we have under law and the MBA, we retain,” with the acknowledgment that the companies own the copyright of our material, and so they have some power to use the stuff that they own. We have to be realistic about that.

Where did the AMPTP make concessions in the negotiations, and where did the WGA make concessions?

Stiehm: The amazing thing is there are so many places that they would not even talk about or would not even negotiate on May 1st, and then all this time later, there were a lot of things that they did talk about and gave us. And what’s really important to us is that there were real gains for every sector of this membership. Screenwriters got new and important protections, and so did comedy-variety writers, and the television proposals were complicated because it wasn’t just the minimum staff size. There was sort of this weird narrative that that was one sticking point, which was just false, because we had these interlocking proposals that all needed to be accepted to work together and restore the way that a writer can make a really good living as a television writer that the streaming model had come in and sort of degraded over the last decade. So we really got protections for all of our members, which was our hope and is what we ended up being able to do.

And where do you feel that the Writer’s Guild compromised and gave the AMPTP something?

Keyser: Well, without getting really specific, we said from the very beginning that we needed to address all of these existential problems. We listed a whole bunch of them, but we said that we were open to conversations about the solutions within limits, and we were. So for example, would we have wanted an even greater bonus in streaming than we got? Of course we would have. And in our proposal, we asked for more, but it became a conversation about numbers and we settled on something in between, and that’s how negotiations work. And there are plenty of places like that. Would we have wanted higher minimums? Of course, right?

Ultimately, which issue or issues ended up being the most important to the WGA in this round of talks? What were the issues that became your hill to die on?

Keyser: No, it really, really did not work out that way. By the way, the contract proves that, right? We had said all the way along that — we had a lot of other things besides this — we identified five key areas: for Appendix A, for [issues affecting] screenwriters, for the streaming residuals, for protection of the writers room, and the protections from AI. And we said we had to get something in all of them, that we were negotiable inside of that. We got all of them, and none of those issues ever became a blocking issue [an issue over which we would have had an impasse] in this negotiation. We never faced that moment, and you can see that we succeeded in each of them. What was the much greater problem for a while was after SAG went on strike, it took about 40 days or so for the companies to resolve the impasse inside their room and have the four CEOs engage with us in a way that led to productive negotiations, but no single issue stood between us and the resolution of this strike.

Are there crossover issues where the WGA made inroads with the AMPTP that could help or advance SAG-AFTRA in its own negotiations?

Keyser: Well, I don’t want to speak for them. My guess is, from what they’ve said, that they have some overlap on AI and residuals and minimums, but there may be other things. I just don’t know their contract well enough, and it’s not fair for me to comment on that. What was really important is what I think the Writers Guild did, which was to reset the balance between management and labor. I would say that management needs to take into account the needs, the basic needs, of the workforce.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems from the deal terms that the WGA did not end up getting protections for members if they don’t want to cross the picket line of another union. Given that, what will be your guidance to members when it comes to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA picket lines this fall?

Stiehm: Just to get to the picket line tomorrow. We’re going to stay with them, we’re going to stand with them. They were there day one of our strike — long before they went out, they were supporting us — and we owe them that, and we want them to get a really strong contract, and we want to keep up our alliance with them and with the other unions that supported us.

Once writers are back to work, when and if faced with a SAG-AFTRA picket line as they’re trying to theoretically go to work, what would be your guidance about how to handle that situation?

Keyser: I think it’s fair to say to our writers that it’s OK to ask if work can happen offsite or remotely. It’s OK for a showrunner to request that on behalf of their staffs. In the long run, if people choose to do that, it’s just the reality. There isn’t protection under labor law for people who refuse to cross picket lines, but the relationship between the company and their writers now that we’ve gotten back to work is usually a cooperative one, and I don’t imagine the companies have any particular reason to embarrass the writers who [want to] both do the work they were employed to do and also respect the people who walked alongside us for so many days.

To go back briefly to the CEOs entering the conversation, how did the CEOs coming in in the last week or so change the tenor and efficacy of the negotiations, if at all?

Keyser: It was essential. It was essential. I mean, the AMPTP process tends to be a very conservative process that attempts to limit in every way it can the gains that it gives to writers. And it led to the first dual strikes in 62 years. By the time the CEOs began to engage again, they did so understanding that these problems that we were bringing to the table needed to be handled seriously, and we had serious, meaningful negotiation. As Meredith said, the bulk of them happened in three days. So I think that’s the proof of it. Having wrangled their own room and come to terms with what writers need, and understanding the cost of the strike on both sides, [they said], “Enough is enough, it’s time to make a deal.”

Stiehm: It seemed that there must have been some impasse among the AMPTP because they were taking so long and they just probably had dissent in their ranks, but by the time the CEOs got with us, they were ready to make a deal and we were ready to make a deal. And I think I said that I thought it was such a shame that it hadn’t happened earlier because when we all got serious, it got done in a pretty small amount of time.

Keyser: A good example of that is they came with a proposal on the streaming bonus [last Wednesday], which they had said that they weren’t going to give, but they worked it out among themselves, and it was that work that they had done before that led to the negotiated settlement on that.

Who helped move the talks along in the room on the other side of the table, in your view? Were there particular studio or streamer-side or AMPTP individuals who really helped take the talks to the next stage?

Keyser: The four CEOs in that room.

Stiehm: Yeah, the four CEOs, and I mean over the course of three days, there’s a lot of people talking, a lot of people leading. But everyone had the same goal, and we were with the people that could make the decisions, so we could actually get a lot of work done.

Keyser: And you can probably tell from what you know about the AMPTP process that it is consensual inside that room. So it required all four of those CEOs to be working together and to have already wrangled the other companies who were not in the smaller room.

Was one CEO or two particularly helpful in that regard?

Keyser. [In] different ways, all of them were necessary and helpful.

What didn’t the WGA accomplish that you personally would like to prioritize in the next round of negotiations in three years?

Stiehm: We got a lot. I mean, of course it was a negotiation, so we didn’t get everything we wanted, we didn’t get every number we wanted, but we’re quite happy with it.

Keyser: What we tend to do is we step up the gains that we made — higher residuals, higher minimums. Many of those numbers may go up. But here’s the other thing: We’ll see in two and a half years what the business actually demands of us, and we’ll have to be flexible about that. So it’s a little too soon. I don’t think we’re looking at this right now and thinking about what we didn’t get. We’re thinking about what we got, and it is so much for so many people. As Meredith said, [it was] something for everybody: We promised that no one would let be left behind, and no one was.

Earlier this month, the WGA negotiating committee said in a statement that it believed that legacy studios were more willing to concede on particular points than other AMPTP Class A companies, and offered to do a separate deal with them. Now that the tentative deal is reached, what is the WGA’s view on how united the companies are under the umbrella of the AMPTP? Does it still believe that the companies underneath the AMPTP are fractured?

Stiehm: It’s hard to know.

Keyser: Look, I think that the divergence in their business interests remains. The divergence between the streamers and the legacy companies remains. What will happen two and a half years from now and how that will work out, which companies are there and which companies are not, I don’t know. But it is not just labor that needs to look at the AMPTP and say, “This process doesn’t work.” It’s also the companies themselves.

When future entertainment and labor history books describe this era, how do you hope they remember this deal and this negotiation and its significance? What are you hoping is its lasting legacy or impact?

Keyser: I think it was as good an example as you could have of not only what it means when members stand together and say, “You have to account for us and what we need to survive,” but also what happens when guilds and unions across the industry stand together, which is what happened this time. So what you watched was kind of a coalition of labor interests that we have not seen in this industry for a long, long time. I believe that the gains we made will be meaningful and lasting. They last beyond the term of this contract, I hope that they have very long-term protection for writers, although we may need to adjust as the business adjusts, but what will last is the legacy of what it means for 171,000 people to be marching a picket line together and for all the other guilds and unions in this industry to stand side by side with us, as the Teamsters did and IATSE did, the laborers and the electrical workers and the musicians. And then beyond that, even others in labor, the AFL-CIO and the hotel workers and janitors, strippers, everybody. And the appearance by the U.S. National Women’s soccer team, the NFL Players Association.

This was a moment, as people have said, of labor power where labor said, “We are no longer OK with being ignored.” It’s not just that strikes are effective, strikes are the only way sometimes to get what labor needs, and we will use that tool if we need to. And when we stand together, strikes win. They are the way that labor achieves what it needs. Nothing happens just by saying “please.”

Stiehm: I would say this deal is transformative for writers. They shot really high, we shot really high, and we got there, and I hope it emboldens other unions, to have shown that if you fight, if you stand your ground, there’s no losing. I mean, they have to feel the power. It could take a long time, and it’s sort of a leap of faith, but that is how you win.

Keyser: It’s funny, because [negotiating committee member and The Good Place creator] Mike Schur was just texting me. He said, “A line that keeps occurring to me is, ‘Management tries to tell labor that strikes never work, but sometimes when a union is pushed too far, the truth is that only strikes work.'”

Stiehm: Yeah, and we just proved that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.