Writers Guild Staffers Take To the Picket Lines: ‘They’ve Taken Lessons From AMPTP’

It’s around 12:30 on Wednesday on Fairfax and 3rd St., and the doors to the Writers Guild of America West headquarters have a sign informing members that it is indefinitely closed save for those who “are working or otherwise authorized.”

That does not include the approximately two dozen staffers picketing just outside those doors, who jeer as a man carrying a box enters. “Shame!” they cry as they carry signs comparing the writers’ union they work for to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the studio reps whom the WGA struck against three years ago and with whom they are set to negotiate with on a new contract next month.

But those talks may happen while WGA West itself faces a strike of its own from the 115 employees who have organized under the Writers Guild Staff Union (WGSU) and who initiated a strike on Tuesday after six months of contract talks led to an impasse. Dylan Holmes, co-chair of the union’s bargaining committee, accused the WGA of not negotiating with its own employees in good faith as they would expect of the studios.

“I would say that the WGA has learned a lot more from the AMPTP and [former president] Carol Lombardini than they have from the rest of the labor movement, and I find that very sad,” Holmes said.

WGAW sent similar assurances in a memo to members that the WGSU strike would not affect the guild’s contract talks with the studios, which are scheduled to begin March 16. However, due to the strikes, two meetings scheduled this week to allow members to discuss bargaining priorities with the WGA negotiating committee were cancelled.

On the picket lines, members of WGAW’s communications team who unionized with WGSU shook their heads in disbelief at the memo, dismissing it as an attempt to downplay staffers’ contributions to the guild’s effectiveness in engaging the writers they represent.

They noted that during the 2023 strikes, the staffers on the communication and member organizing teams facilitated training meetings for writers who volunteered to be strike captains. Later, when SAG-AFTRA went on strike, they coordinated meetings between WGA’s strike captains and members of the actors’ union to help get them up to speed on the logistics of picketing.

“So much of the work that was done by our staff union members in 2023 was instrumental to that strike,” communications director Bob Hopkinson said. “We built that communication system to funnel key insider information from the leadership and negotiating committee to the members every step of the way.”

‘Surface-level bargaining’

When the WGA and SAG-AFTRA went on strike in 2023, the sticking points that led to a labor stoppage were well-defined: protections against artificial intelligence, ending the practice of mini-rooms and a new compensation model for streaming were the issues that had to be resolved after months of picket lines.

But when asked by TheWrap about what sticking points led to this strike, WGSU said it wasn’t any specific area of the contract but rather a general trend of “surface-level bargaining,” as negotiating committee member Kayley Nagle put it. When talks began in September, she said she believed that the union would have a deal in less than two months.

“I thought that it would be a stretch to think we’d still be talking by Thanksgiving,” Nagle said. “But from the beginning, we weren’t having any sort of back-and-forth conversation. They would leave the room, and come back with few, if any, changes to their counterproposal. We’d spend five hours giving them a full pass back, and they come back in 10 minutes. I was shocked by that.”

Instead, Holmes and Nagle said that the WGAW negotiators showed little willingness to negotiate on many of the key points in WGSU’s proposal, which includes salary bumps and job protections,. One example cited was its proposal on just cause protections that would include due process through arbitration. Such protections are standard in union contracts.

In its side-by-side proposal comparison, WGAW said it “can only discipline employees for just cause, and Guild will follow principles of progressive discipline,” but reserved “special rules” for cases involving “performance-related issues.” In its own comparison, WGSU claimed that the WGAW’s proposal would only allow for arbitration in the “most severe” forms of punishment.

The WGSU also pushed back on the guild’s characterization of how employees are paid. WGAW’s proposal would raise the minimum annual salary for staffers from $43,000 to $57,000, with a 3% increase in pay for all workers upon ratification and annual increases of 4% and 3% in the subsequent years of the contract. The guild also noted that its staffers currently receive the same annual increases that writers in the union receive under the WGA.

WGSU members who spoke to TheWrap rejected that comparison, noting that unlike writers, they don’t have agents who can negotiate overscale pay for them. Their salary is all they have, which is why they proposed a seniority-based scale starting at $59,737 with a 7.5% increase upon ratification and 5% increases in each of the next two years.

“What we are looking for is a basic standard. A standard in how people are paid, promoted and disciplined,” Holmes said. “They want to retain complete control. They want the unilateral right to set our wages. They want the unilateral right to make decisions on hiring and promotions. They want this to be like any other corporate workplace instead of setting an example for the rest of labor as one of the most high-profile unions in the country.”

This past August, WGSU filed an unfair labor practice charge against WGAW with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing the company of retaliatory termination of an employee who had been involved in unionization efforts among staffers one day prior to the union going public in April 2025. WGSU claims that two more members faced retaliatory termination this past November as talks continued.

WGAW denied all unfair labor practice charges in a statement on Tuesday, saying that they were “without merit.” With regards to the terminations, the guild claims on its website that the firing last April was due to “performance issues” while the two subsequent firings were for cause with the members represented by the Pacific Northwest Staff Union, under whom the WGSU is organized.

“During the course of 19 negotiating sessions since September, the Guild has offered the staff union comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and working conditions,” the statement read, adding that the guild “will continue to prepare for the upcoming MBA negotiations, and management staff will carry on the core functions of the Guild. We look forward to a resolution of a first contract with the staff union.”

The WGSU said that it doesn’t plan to directly engage the union’s members as part of its strike, wanting them to focus on their own upcoming contract talks. But despite that, Nagle said that WGA members have reached out to their WGSU counterparts to offer their support, and donations have poured into a strike hardship fund with nearly $22,000 raised in the first three days of the labor stoppage.

“We want the writers to know, and I think they understand, that we are on the same side. We want a fair contract with the WGA just as we want the writers to have a fair contract with the AMPTP,” Nagle said. “We went through 2023 together, and we want a fair contract so we can get back to working for the writers, because we’re all in the same fight.”

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