THIS IS A TEMP DEMONSTRATION - VOTE FOR CARLETON EASTLAKE WGAw Secretary-Treasurer 2017
If you've found this page...it is a temp placeholder for a page for my pending novel MONKEY BUSINESS, using my WGAW campaign site. This is the campaign website for Carleton Eastlake, a candidate for election to the office of Secretary-Treasurer of the Writers Guild Of America West in 2017.
ABOUT THIS PAGE...
Collecting endorsements for non-candidate statements published in the official Election Booklet is a Guild tradition. I hope you'll add your name to my supporters' statement by entering your information in the app below. And if you scroll down, you'll also find my complete Candidate's Statement. Thanks!
CARL'S CANDIDATE'S STATEMENT...
CARLETON EASTLAKE
CANDIDATE STATEMENT
2017 WGAW OFFICE OF SECRETARY-TREASURER
Thank you for taking the time to look at this. If you just read the bold-faced headings and passages below, you’ll get the executive summary.
THE GUILD IS A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR ENTERPRISE
I don’t think we often view it this way, but the Officers and Board members you elect supervise the negotiation and enforcement of a contract that directly governs nearly four billion dollars in “writing” income each contract cycle and significantly effects (or during a strike, outright blocks) billions more of our “producing” income.
They also appoint trustees to control our three-billion-dollar pension fund and health plan. If our 15,000 members were organized as a company instead of a union, we’d be on the Fortune 1000 list.
MEASURING THE GUILD’S SUCCESS
To state the obvious, given how big the Guild is, it should be fact-driven by the best data it can get.
My wife and I, both Guild members, were perched on folding chairs on a well-known screenwriter’s wide lawn listening to a Guild presentation before the 2007 strike when I asked the question: how could the Guild tell if its organizing and striking paid off with genuine net gains in TV? Since the Guild in that era collected no data about over-scale “producer” income, what kept the studios from simply paying for higher minimums and other benefits by reducing the rest of our compensation?
The Guild’s Executive Director gave me an honest answer: the Guild, in that era, didn’t know for sure.
I’d asked the question because before I became a writer I’d been a lawyer. Representing companies such as Standard Oil of California and British Airways and serving as an Attorney-Advisor to a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and then as the Commission’s Acting Regional Director for Southern California and Arizona, I’d supervised hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer protection and antitrust litigation that used extensive economic evidence of the sort that the Guild could, but wasn’t, collecting.
After I became active in Guild work, I began pushing the Guild to gather that information. Following my reelection to the Board in 2011, I sent our new President Chris Keyser a detailed memo proposing that the Guild explore collecting data about writer-producer income so we’d truly know if we were winning or losing.
It took another three years of debate and exploratory surveys before that program was fully in motion – and many other Board members, our Executive Director and his staff, and Chris himself were instrumental in bringing it about – but the effort was worth it: this year we mobilized for a potential strike by confronting the studios with specific, concrete evidence that they had been rapidly undermining our real incomes. And going forward, we’ll have a baseline against which to measure how much we’re really gaining and where we must do better.
As Secretary-Treasurer I will continue to work to strengthen and modernize the Guild. Although the Guild does an excellent job, our industry is changing so rapidly and powerfully we can never stop exploring how the Guild could do even better.
THE FUNDAMENTAL DILEMMA OF GUILD NEGOTIATIONS
Before I discuss the specifics of some of the things we could consider doing next, I should address the fundamental chicken-and-egg dilemma that I think impacts much of what the Guild already does. (I should also stress that I’m only speaking for myself; this isn’t explicit, consciously voiced Guild policy.)
The Guild can’t make major gains unless the companies believe Guild members (by which I mean all of you reading this and me) are strongly enough committed to new negotiation demands to potentially strike. But Guild members quite sensibly won’t reach that level of commitment unless the Guild first persuades us it’s worthwhile and justified (and hopefully by using good, convincing data).
However, if the Guild tries to persuade us to commit to a conflict negotiation (or, for that matter, a new enforcement strategy) addressing a given issue and fails, the companies will almost certainly become aware of it and the Guild will be badly weakened in negotiations. And what’s at risk is enormous: a Guild misstep could cost us millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in pay, creative rights, residuals, or health and pension benefits.
Because of these risks the Guild is often potentially in danger of falling into the sort of trap economists might call a vicious cycle: if members don’t already look persuadable, the Guild must be cautious about engaging with them, but if the Guild is too cautious in engaging with them, the members may never become well-informed enough about an issue to ever appear persuadable.
This is a real, not theoretical problem. In 2014 we still appeared so exhausted by the 2007 strike that the Guild did not try to mobilize us for a major conflict negotiation. Perceiving this as a weakness, the companies immediately proposed sixty million dollars in rollbacks. Happily, this was such a shocking overreach that it backfired: we were so spontaneously outraged that the studios were scared into backing away from the rollbacks and even into making concessions on options and exclusivity.
This year, in part because of how 2014 played out, the Guild did prepare for a conflict negotiation by intensively engaging the membership with the new data on writers’ incomes. Even so, it took until January before the Guild leadership decided to take the risk of conducting a full, public mobilization. Happily again, once engaged and informed, Guild members responded with spectacular support and so won significant gains in TV…and without a strike.
Let me stress that there is no way to avoid this chicken-and-egg dilemma: it is inherent in the fact that the Guild is a democracy with nearly ten thousand voters that must negotiate against an alliance of studios in which only six or seven votes count. The key question then is how to minimize this dynamic as much as possible.
So, now for some specifics…
A NEW APPROACH FOR SCREEN WRITERS
The 2017 negotiations worked well for TV writers, but as all of us frankly admitted, didn’t attempt to win major remedies for the plight of screenwriters (although since most writers now work in both fields, TV gains still are potentially valuable to writers working in features).
Properly discussing the issues screenwriters face would require more room than a Candidate Statement can reasonably take, but to greatly over-simplify, the situation seems to be this: The studios have drastically cut back on the number of films they release and have increasingly relied on existing intellectual property rather than original, spec scripts.
This in turn has generated such personal, competitive pressures on screenwriters that they feel it is too individually risky for them to invoke the powers the Guild already has over free-rewrites, late pay, and similar issues. Likewise many screenwriters feel it is futile to seek additional Guild contract provisions, since individual writers will still face the same pressures against invoking them.
Given this situation, I would like the Guild to begin a new effort to develop strategies that: 1) don’t put individual writers at risk, and 2) don’t depend on potentially risky public efforts to mobilize them.
One way to do this is already available although it hasn’t been used in many years: the Board’s own operating Rules provide for the appointment of a Screenwriters Council to serve as advisors to the Board. The Board readopts these rules every year, but in the eight years I’ve been on the Board, although screenwriters have participated in the studio professional status meetings and such, a Screenwriters Council has never been appointed.
True, a Council might be just one more bureaucratic redundancy or even cause confusion over policy – and a number of screenwriters serve directly on the Board – but it’s at least possible that a Screenwriting Council might produce new ideas about strategies to defend the screenwriting community while also serving as a lower profile and thus less risky way to inform and ultimately mobilize writers around new issues.
At the same time, the Guild should deepen its research program into trends in screenwriting compensation, working and creative conditions, and how they vary among writers of different experience and stature and across different producers and studios. People who have taken the Screenwriters Survey know some of this has already been done, but I think a more complete, recurring program should be conducted. Concrete knowledge about trends in TV compensation persuaded TV writers to back strong negotiations in 2017; better knowledge may help screenwriters in 2020.
Finally, the Guild should consider expanding its staff to stay in even closer contact with the screenwriting community. Because TV writers mostly work in story rooms it is easier to meet with them and foster united efforts to address their issues. I think it might be a worthwhile experiment for the Guild to add more staff to increase the frequency and quality of lower-profile, more private contacts with screenwriters to increase our ability to conduct similar, more united efforts to defend their interests.
An important point about all this is that it may help ameliorate the chicken-and-egg problem of Guild organizing. If the Guild in a less public, more low-key, but pervasive way engages and informs screenwriters on a continuing basis – assuming screenwriters have the time and patience for it – we may avoid the worst hazards of the Guild telegraphing to the studios the degree to which we’re attempting to mobilize support for a given effort until we’re ready to act.
Will any of this help? There is one clear way to find out. At the moment the Guild can afford it – we’re enjoying substantial annual surpluses because of peak TV – so I think we should make a concerted effort over the next couple of years to see if we can improve conditions for screenwriters.
OTHER FIELDS OF WRITING
Most of what I said above could also be applied to every other field of writing the Guild represents, whether comedy-variety, quiz show, documentaries and reality, independent low budget film, games, animation, or webisodes.
The point is not to pressure writers into organizing efforts that ultimately fail. Rather, the question is can an expansion of granular information about compensation, working conditions, and industry economics, and the creation of better forums in which writers can examine new strategies with Guild staff, along with a modest expansion of that staff lead to new gains? I’d like to find out.
I have seen even minor efforts like this pay off in the past. As part of an earlier outreach program I hosted a meeting at my home attended by independent film makers that began the process leading to an improved low budget agreement. So an afternoon of conversation – and then a whole lot of work – did resolve at least one issue for screenwriters.
DIVERSITY
Some of the same approaches above may also help our diversity programs. For years the Guild has provided the foundation data for industry studies by the Ralph J. Bunche Center at UCLA. Just as granular real-world data about writers’ compensation in TV unlocked the gains made in the 2017 negotiations, the Guild should develop more granular data about compensation, working conditions, and career lifecycles for all its members broken out by age, gender, ethnicity, education, prior history, and other useful factors. That information would allow for diversity programs to be better designed and motivated and would also allow all members to better deal with career and financial planning.
Isolation weakens us, but forewarned is forearmed: precise, accurate information about working conditions for every type of writer in every field we represent will strengthen us both as individuals and as members of a union taking joint action.
AGENCIES AND PACKAGING
And there’s one more reason why we need to be forearmed. The major agencies have increasingly become less like true agents and more like labor-contractors or even adversarial producers who are compensated by packaging agreements that favor their interests ahead of our own or even put them into direct conflict with our interests.
When I started as a writer, all I needed was an agent and a lawyer on a fee basis. Now, in part because of the enormous conflicts of interest at the major agencies, many writers have the horrible drain of paying twenty-five percent of their income to teams of lawyers, managers, and agents.
Pressure over agency issues has been slowly, but volcanically building for years; I think in part depending on the chicken-and-egg dynamic discussed above, it may – or may not – come to a head, depending on how soon and how strongly we, as members, want it to.
THE JOB OF SECRETARY-TREASURER
Since it’s the office I’m running for, I should also say something about the specific functions of the Secretary-Treasurer. Guild officers, of course, do not directly run the Guild. That work is done by an Executive Director leading full-time professional staff who know far more about balance sheets or computer operations than writers serving as unpaid volunteers on the Board.
And the work of the Guild is more complicated and far-reaching than I think we often realize. The Guild fulfills most of the functions of a modern government and all of the functions of a large, specialized law firm. Every three years it negotiates a nearly 700-page, multi-billion-dollar contract as well as specialized contracts in news, new media, low-budget productions and the like; the Guild then conducts research and enforcement actions to collect the money owed to us under those contracts. At any one time the Guild has about 500 legal cases in progress.
The Guild also conducts educational programs, diversity programs, a modest program to help writers in financial distress, appoints trustees to that three-billion-dollar health and pension fund and sometimes goes out on strike, which is a little like a government waging war. And the Guild supports all these activities by, yes, taxing our income.
The Guild also conducts yearly elections with nearly 10,000 potential voters to govern how it does all these things. Which is why you’re reading this very long Candidate Statement.
Although Guild officers don’t directly perform this work, they are responsible for testing, challenging, inspiring, advising – and hopefully not too badly hindering – the Executive Director and his staff and, with their advice, setting the major policies, priorities, and budget of the Guild.
Although I would never say it’s a necessary qualification for Secretary-Treasurer, it probably doesn’t hurt in providing oversight to Guild operations that I studied accounting, labor law, and the influence of philosophy and the social sciences on the law in law school and had a decade’s practical experience as a Federal civil law enforcement attorney.
SOME OF MY RECENT WORK FOR THE GUILD
In part because of this background, I’ve served for the past five years as the representative Board member on the Membership And Finance Committee, which is chaired by the Secretary-Treasurer and provides oversight over the Guild’s financial operations, expenditures, investments, grants and loans to writers in distress, dues collection, and budgeting.
After repeatedly seeing deeply moving case histories of writers applying to the Committee for help when they fell into financial distress, two years ago I scripted and hosted a panel of financial experts to answer the basic questions writers have about financial planning; videos of those answers are permanently available on the Guild website.
Last year because, of my work on the Committee, I introduced and the Board passed a motion for the Guild to hire outside consultants to advise us on how to safely invest our accumulating surplus operating funds which are now at $29 million dollars but need to be easily and reliably available if we strike. The consultants completed their report some months ago and I think it’s time for us to carefully and conservatively consider placing some of the recommended investments.
This year I’m also serving for the second time on a three-person commission responsible for negotiating with the Guild’s own chief negotiator, our Executive Director David Young, to set his new multi-year contract. Previously I proposed and the Board adopted procedures to conduct a routine annual performance evaluation of our Executive Director and one way or another I’ve now served on three committees responsible for reforming our election rules and modernizing our Constitution.
Given my background in law, I’ve also felt that I should test the legal advice the Guild receives from our truly excellent General Counsel and legal department. Lawyers have the saying that justice delayed is justice denied, to which I’d add, residuals delayed may be mortgages unpaid. When I joined the Board, the then legal department was struggling with a backlog of more than 700 cases and didn’t publish its case numbers to the membership; that number now runs at or below 500 – and the Guild publishes the statistics each year in our Annual Report.
BETTER INFORMATION FOR MEMBERS
Although, as for everything else, the Guild has a highly professional staff to communicate with its members – by which I again mean you and me – I feel that the “Secretary” part of the title Secretary-Treasurer also implies oversight responsibility for member communications.
The 2017 strike authorization vote caused painful confusion when over a thousand current voting members of the Guild were told – many by a late-evening email – they wouldn’t be permitted to vote on the strike itself or the resulting contract. The special voting rules were required by a long-standing agreement between Guild East and Guild West meant to impose uniform standards on the process, but many intensely active Guild members didn’t know about the rules and were disappointed, angered or even humiliated to learn about them abruptly and belatedly.
Likewise, Guild members were asked to vote on a strike authorization even though the strike loan rules and the strike work rules hadn’t yet been approved and published by the Board.
As another example, time and again I’ve heard members dangerously confused about the differences between life membership in the Guild and what some mistakenly believe are life benefits from the Health Fund.
I’d like the Guild to create an Owner’s Manual and FAQ for the Guild that provides this type of information in an easy to use way on-line, and to remind members once a year by an email blast of where to find it. Our evolving website has much of this already, but we clearly need to do more.
At the same time – and I’m sure other candidates will be discussing this – we’ve been working on a Members Directory for many years. It’s past time to make a final decision about deploying it on-line.
IN CONCLUSION
If you’ve read this far, I’m grateful for your attention and embarrassed at the time I’ve taken. Ever since college and law school I’ve believed that unions are essential to modern democracy, and I’ve valued the Guild throughout my career as a writer.
But although the Guild is an amazing example of how good a professional organization and union can be, I think there’s still more we can do to empower it to defend us in this age of tent pole films, peak TV, and the big bang of the Internet – so I hope you’ll elect me to the office of Secretary-Treasurer to help carry on that work.
Thank you.
Fill out my online form.
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