WGA West Officer & Board Candidates Address Wide Range Of Issues – And The Strike Isn’t The Only Thing On Their Minds

David Robb
·9 min read
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Yes, there’s a writers strike going on, but the WGA West is also conducting an officer and board election, and the candidates, though they all support the strike, are expressing a wide range of other concerns in statements they’ve posted on the guild’s election site.

Meredith Stiehm, who’s running for re-election as president, hasn’t posted her statement yet, but all the other officer candidates have, and they have a lot to say.

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Rich Talarico, a Peabody Award winner and four-time Emmy-nominated writer and producer who’s perhaps best known for his work on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele, writes that “Achieving transparency regarding writer payments and accounting practices, will be the cornerstones of my leadership. Too often, writers who work in good faith are routinely met with confusing payment charts, unclear royalty checks, and unverifiable systems. Under the current model, it’s nearly impossible for a writer to understand where and how their work is being offered, consumed, and compensated for.”

“Many of us have experienced our own personal transparency horror stories,” he wrote. “I recently received an SNL royalty check and the cryptic payment detail simply read, “RESIDUALS,” with zero explanation as to what platform(s) the payment was intended to cover.

“As studios embed with and become streamers (Paramount+, Peacock, Disney +/Hulu), it is increasingly important for writers to have clear access to streaming numbers to determine fairness. Unions and companies must adopt clear standards for monitoring streaming use, ensuring fairness to both sides.”

See his full candidate’s statement here.

Talarico, who for years has been battling against a contract provision that allows for the “ongoing and persistent abuse” of five-minute promotional clips of TV shows, says that they “significantly harm writers’ potential compensation.”

Of Key & Peele, he said, “we have amassed billions of views on promotional excerpts while receiving checks for pennies on the dollar in compensation, because this ‘promotion’ actually suffocates compensable platforms.”

Comparing these promotional clips to a visit to Panda Express, he wrote: “Where the manager offers chicken on a toothpick to entice purchase, studios should avoid flooding potential customers with endless free samples without pay for writers. Such practices deter viewers from paying for the full menu. While the MBA is silent on the number of permissible uploads, the contract language could not have intended this endless over-saturation of ‘promotional’ clips with zero pay for writers. Writers were hired to create TV shows, not endless web-shows masquerading as ‘promotion.’”

He’s also campaigning on expanding the guild’s jurisdiction to cover reality shows; ending free work during the pitching and development process; ending mini-rooms and granting full membership and voting status to “post current” members who haven’t worked in recent years.

Michele Mulroney, a member of the guild’s negotiating committee who’s running for re-election as vice president, said in her statement that “The inter-union solidarity during our labor action has been nothing short of historic. The support and sacrifice of so many sibling unions – both inside and outside of the entertainment business – has helped to sustain us through our MBA Negotiation cycle. When the time comes, we must reciprocate and stand by them. Nurses, teachers, Amazon warehouse workers, janitors; we are one union family! And of course, the WGA will stand in solidarity when IATSE, the Animation Guild and Teamsters fight for fair contracts in their negotiations.”

The guild’s board, she said, must also “keep its eyes on the horizon in this next term and be hyper-vigilant in future-proofing our Guild against the tide of incoming changes that will impact our business and writers’ livelihoods. The streaming services are launching AVOD options, but hot on their heels are FAST channels like Pluto TV, Tubi, Freevee whose user numbers are rapidly catching up with AVOD. Writers need their fair share of these revenue streams.”

And artificial intelligence, she said, “is going to be a dominant issue for years to come. The WGA must work hand in hand with our sister unions and experts in the field to assess the evolution of the large language models (ChatGPT and others) that threaten to decrease job opportunities for writers, suppress writer pay, and use writers’ work without their permission. Through our political action committee, we must advocate for appropriate regulatory and legislative actions to protect our members and the wider creative workforce from the abuses of this new tech.”

See her full statement here.

Her opponent, Isaac Gómez, who’s currently serving as a strike captain, said he accepted the nomination for vice president “because, to be frank, I did not see myself reflected amongst our core leadership. Why does this matter? Well, according to our Inclusion & Equity Report released in 2022, writers of color joining the Guild has increased dramatically over the last ten years – nearly half of our Guild is comprised of writers of color – making our union the most racially diverse it’s ever been.

“And yet, there are no people of color in our core leadership positions (President/Vice President/Secretary-Treasurer), and there has not been one in several years. There have been many instances in my time as Strike Captain and Writers Room Captain where I’ve had to bring issues writers of color were experiencing to the forefront as some decision-making processes weren’t taking into consideration their specific needs, and the needs of other underrepresented writers.”

“Writers facing housing insecurity, on food stamps, and experiencing unemployment for months at a time is at its absolute high,” he says. “Negotiating for fair and equitable contracts with the AMPTP is one part of it. But what happens after? How do we ensure economic sustainability throughout periods outside of contract negotiations?

“Right now, the Guild has a plethora of financial resources for writers in need, yet many writers aren’t aware of their existence or – due to paperwork anxiety and trauma – are unable to pursue those resources. I am committed to finding alternative ways of communicating resources available to the writers most in need – early career writers, working class writers, and writers of color. As Vice President, I intend to hold monthly workshops where we partner with Financial Advisors and Tax Accountants who hold seminars on best practices for financial management, growth, and sustainability.”

See his full statement here.

Betsy Thomas, who’s running for re-election as secretary-treasurer, said that she’s running for one more term “because it’s essential that we do not change course with our leadership right now.”

As the current chair of the Membership & Finance Committee and the Strike Fund Committee, she said that “we are in the middle of very, very important work to ensure giving financial support currently to as many of our members as we can, while balancing wanting to ensure that the same financial support will be there for members up to six months after the strike is settled.  Our committee is very thoughtful, compassionate, but never forgets our responsibility to the entire membership to be fiscally diligent in the process.

“But what I have seen in the hundreds of loan applications is a story of why we are on strike: members who have worked on two or even three shows a year – or have been doing six months of free rewrites on a script they sold – who cannot afford their reasonable rent, are facing thousands of dollars in credit card debt and even hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans.

“Or the member who had been working as a part of a team on a 16-week streaming gig at minimum, whose parent falls ill and they suddenly need to support them, and they have exhausted their savings with no hope to handle the insanely high Los Angeles cost of living.

“Or there’s the writer who has been a dues-paying member for 30 years, who after twenty years of making a six-figure living in network television sees their income and residuals disappear with the shift to the rickety world of streaming employment.

“All of the sacrifice that we’ve made in the past months MUST yield a contract that ensures an actual future for all of us.  I cannot wait for the day that this important struggle is in the rearview mirror, but in the meantime, I stay committed to this victory… What I have learned in the past five years in leadership is: we the WGA are extraordinary. I am honored to be one of you. Now let’s get this over the finish line.”

See her full statement here.

Jeffrey Thompson, her opponent for secretary-treasurer, is campaigning to end abusive behavior in the film and TV industry – including abuse by fellow writers.

“In the past decade we’ve dealt with contract negotiations, packaging, massive changes in the industry through both streaming and how people consume media online, and other things that threaten our ability to make a living as writers, but there’s one threat that is eating away at the integrity of our guild,” he said in his statement.

“We have a problem with abuse in our industry and it needs to stop. Especially since many of the abuses that writers deal with can’t be blamed on the AMPTP or the studios, but on other writers who use their power to intimidate and manipulate others. And those who are abused are put into a situation in which they can either stay silent and tolerate those abuses (in the hopes that they’ll get a recommendation by their abuser for a future job) or speak up and risk being blacklisted. If we as a guild cannot protect the most vulnerable among us, then we are failing as a guild.”

“We all have either experienced or known others who have experienced mistreatment, but like many injustices in our industry, we tend to keep quiet. But when we are quiet, then we are allowing harm to continue,” he said. “We need to foster a culture of safety and understanding in our guild. Because if we are the ones who are tearing each other down, then any gains that we make in this and any future negotiations are relatively meaningless.”

See his full statement here.

Earlier today, the guild released the names of all the candidates who have qualified for the officer and board election.

In addition to the officer candidates, there are 20 candidates nominated to run for eight open seats on the board of directors, including Molly Nussbaum, Danielle Iman, Maggie Levin, Blake Masters, Rob Forman, Alex O’Keefe, Jonterri Gadson, Leah Folta, Grant Scharbo, Sean Presant, Scott Alexander, Jackie Penn, Kira Snyder, Van Robichaux, Niceole Levy and incumbents Adam Conover, Nicole Yorkin, Dailyn Rodriguez, Dante W. Harper, and Zoe Marshall.

You can see their candidate statements here.

Guild members will receive voting materials on August 29, and voting will end on Sept. 19. The guild will host a Candidates Night forum, where guild members can ask questions of the candidates, on August 30.

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