Chris Keyser and David Goodman, the veteran showrunners who steered the five-month Writers Guild of America strike last yr, warned guild members on Sunday to remain vigilant in a fast-changing business landscape despite the gains of last yr’s historic labor motion.
“Though this strike is over, the fight goes on. If we take our eye off the ball, every thing we gained can literally go away tomorrow,” Goodman told the gang on the Writers Guild Awards on the Hollywood Palladium.
Goodman and Keyser served as co-chairs of the WGA‘s negotiating commttee last yr. The pair, each past presidents of the WGA West, were honored with the guild’s Morgan Cox Awards for dedicated service.
“Nothing is given to labor that it doesn’t demand,” Keyser told the gang.
Keyser said the long struggle of last yr was the tip results of an extended period of getting the union to be more aggressive in contract negotiations.
“It was about education for the Writers Guild. It was a metamorphosis that took nearly 20 years and had its ups and owns and in the long run it turned us right into a fighting force. It taught us to trust one another and our allies and it led us to perform that which each single person that you just meet said we couldn’t try this. Time and again,” Keyser said. “It’s an unbroken chain of sacrifice and bravado that begins with the generation that fought the strike of 2007 and 2008 — [former WGA West president] Patrick Verrone and [former WGA West executive director] David Young — and it extends to to the strike authorization vote of 2017 and the strike 2023.”
References to the strike were frequent in Recent York where the WGA East held a simultaneous ceremony on the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan.
“It’s exhilarating after we won a contract with so many advantages and protections for writers and for the reason that strike ended as a show of tolerating solidarity, I even have remained unemployed,” joked late-night author Josh Gondelman, who hosted the WGA East ceremony.
Later within the night, WGA West president Meredith Stiehm took the stage to deliver an extended list of thank-yous to other Hollywood unions and those that supported the guild during its 148-day work stoppage. Stiehm noted that unlike the 2007-2008 strike, the WGA received strong support from fellow unions last yr. She indicated that WGA members are prepared to reveal solidarity with IATSE members later this yr if that union winds up in a piece stoppage. IATSE at present is deep in contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
As a substitute of being “lone wolves,” Stiehm told the gang, “we’re in a pack — a family of Hollywood labor unions and we can be there for other unions like they were there for us because that’s what family does.”
(Pictured: Chris Keyser)
Lexi Carson contributed to this report.
