After 146 long, testing days of picketing and standing headstrong with each other, the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) have come to an agreement on a new labor contract. What was the second longest Hollywood labor strike in history is finally over.
This new agreement comes with month’s long promises by the AMPTP of not negotiating on several key points. The WGA, facing incredible adversity stood tall on their demands for – among other things – protections for their writers against new AI developments, guaranteed writer’s rooms for network shows, and increased residual revenue and viewership visibility for shows and films on streaming platforms.
It’s important to note that all these points were considered non-negotiable by the AMPTP just 4 months ago. Now, after 4 days of negotiations, an agreement is finally in place. Let’s go over what the WGA won.
While the exact language hasn’t been released, the WGA released a summarized version of the agreed upon points.
Summary
According to the new agreement, “AI can’t write or rewrite literary material, and AI-generated material will not be considered source material under the new MBA.” What this means is that AI cannot undermine the work of a writer or their credits in creating a work.
In addition, writers can choose when to use AI in their writing, given that they follow proper guidelines and regulations and company consent, but a company cannot force writers to use AI. Companies must also disclose to writers if they have used AI to generate materials for a writer or they plan to incorporate AI-generated material. The WGA also “reserves the right to assert the exploitation of writers’ material to train AI is prohibited by MBA or other law.”
These are some wide ranging protections that ensure that companies cannot use AI to replace the work of writers at every stage of the process. Perhaps most importantly, for future implications, is that the WGA is protecting writers’ works from being used to train AI to create content in the future. This is incredibly important for the preservation of writers’ jobs going forward, as companies can’t just use their existing writing now to train AI to write properly in the future.
This was something the AMPTP was unwilling to negotiate on at the beginning of the strike.
The agreement also underlines new pension and health benefits minimums, guaranteed writer’s rooms that increase in size the more episodes are in a season, and new minimum weekly rates for series of varying lengths
In what may be the most important part of the agreement, the AMPTP and WGA agreed on increased residuals for streaming services as well as requiring streaming services to release their audience viewership numbers to the WGA and have these numbers factor into residual payments.
Not only did this not exist prior to the agreement, but was something the AMPTP previously refused to negotiate on.
Going Forward
The WGA strike officially ended Tuesday, September 26th and writers were allowed to return to work. Members of the WGA are expected to ratify the new agreement after voting from October 2nd – 9th. The work in Hollywood labor is not over, however, as SAG-AFTRA is still on strike. They are expected to meet to begin contract bargaining again on October 2nd.
