While the WGA strike has gotten a lot of attention, it's not the only ongoing labor dispute writers had been involved in. Newswriters at CBS have been working without a contract for nearly 3 years - but that ended yesterday with a deal:
Under the terms of the deal, WGA-CBS employees will get a 3.5% pay increase once the contract is ratified, and another 3.5% raise in 2009.
Most regularly scheduled employees who worked 200 days or more last year and didn't get wage increases during negotiations will receive an additional $3,700 payment. Employees who worked shorter schedules will receive prorated payments.
Additionally, the contract includes a provision giving the writers 90 days of warning and bargaining time before CBS consolidates operations.
This is good news for these writers; it's also another example of good use of strategic pressure. One key moment came when the leading Democratic presidential candidates declined a debate on CBS due to the writers' situation.
That show of support, combined with labor actions at the local affiliate stations, may have led CBS to revise its contract proposals, guild leaders said.
“We decided to practice a new kind of labor campaign,” said Mona Mangan, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East. “We worked very actively with Congress, the F.C.C., the Democratic National Committee, the mayor of New York City, and others.”
The WGA has been using similar pressure in the entertainment writers strike, as well as a divide-and-conquer strategy in which it has made separate deals with David Letterman's Worldwide Pants, Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise's United Artists, and, most recently, with the Weinstein Co., the Weinstein brothers' post-Miramax venture. These agreements show it can be done, that the WGA is eager to make fair deals and that successful production companies can afford the terms. This puts some writers back to work (and with them, the other workers who get laid off when productions shut down) and increases pressure on the AMPTP, as the hold-outs become more clear and the public can see that the WGA is not the group unwilling to negotiate.