The WGA continues to gather outside support as negotiations for a new film and TV contract come down to the wire, with LA City Councilman David Ryu, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown and the Allied Pilots Association announcing today that they stand in solidarity with the guild and its objectives. Negotiations, meanwhile, are continuing right up until tonight’s midnight bargaining deadline.
“It is in your power to avoid a work stoppage that will inconvenience millions of Americans and inflict serious economic damage,” Ryu wrote in a letter to CBS, Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, 21st Century Fox, Comcast and Viacom. “We call on you to negotiate a new contract that fairly compensates the creators of your most valuable assets – the writers.”
Warren, the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts, posted this:
“Workers in America are working harder than ever while wages and benefits have declined or stagnated for decades,” wrote Brown, the Ohio Democrat. “Studio executives continue to enjoy record profits, and members of the Writers Guild are simply asking for the fair wages and benefits they deserve. I am proud to stand with these writers in their negotiations and support the right of workers everywhere to bargain for a better quality of life.”
In a letter to AMPTP president Carol Lombardini, airline pilots union president Captain Daniel Carey wrote: “Just as American Airlines pilots have a right to the American Airlines Group’s ample profits, there is no question that the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers can afford to reward the very people who make the studios’ enormous profits possible, the writers. We applaud the writers who voted overwhelmingly to strike, if their demands for higher pay and better benefits are not met. As brothers-and-sisters of organized labor, we hope a strike is not necessary.”
Last week, the NFL Players Association and the AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka expressed their support for the WGA’s bargaining stance.
