The provisional agreement, reached after less than a month of negotiations, boasts health plan and pension increases and protection against writers' work being used for AI training.
The Writers Guild of America has reached a tentative four-year deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers group representing studios and streamers.
The writers’ union and the AMPTP officially confirmed the deal on Saturday evening after The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets reported that a provisional agreement had been reached earlier in the day.
“Today, the WGA Negotiating Committee unanimously approved a tentative agreement with the AMPTP for the 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) for a four-year term,” the union said. “Crucially, it protects our health plan and puts it on a sustainable path, with increased company contributions across many areas and long-needed increases to health contribution caps. The new contract also builds on gains from 2023 and helps address free work challenges.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/writers-guild-members-deal-1236556286/
Inside The WGA West’s Internal Conflict:
How The Staff Strike Has Exposed Writers’ Growing Frustrations With The Guild
Excerpts full article link below
The WGA West staff has now been on strike for nearly seven weeks. The 115-member unit walked off the job in mid-February, having attempted to negotiate its first contract with WGAW management since September and alleging multiple unfair labor practices as well as a refusal to bargain on several topics. The WGA West denies any wrongdoing, but that hasn’t assuaged many members who find the debacle to be a bad look, to say the least.
“It’s, at best, ironic and, at worst, hypocritical,” longtime WGAW member and Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim told Deadline. “Just the naked hypocrisy of resisting your employees unionizing when you, yourself, are a labor union — that’s just a level of cognitive dissonance that I didn’t think anyone was capable of.”
“As far as how the Writers Guild has been messaging things, I kind of feel honestly like there’s been a little bit of willful ignorance to how serious the staff has been and was prior to going out on strike,” Guggenheim added. “It feels to me like the Writer’s Guild never thought that the staff would go out on strike, and that was not a good bet.
Deadline has spoken to more than a dozen other WGAW members who feel similarly, some of whom have joined the staff on the picket line outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters at the busy intersection of Fairfax Ave. and 3rd St. All of them say that the staff strike is only illuminating a rift between members and management that has been growing for some time.
“There’s a whole culture in the guild of ‘Don’t air our dirty laundry,’” another longtime WGA member told Deadline, who says their problems with those in charge have been brewing for some time.
“I’ve been really opposed to a lot of the things that have gone down basically since the whole ATA conflict where we all had to fire our agents,” they added. “That’s when I started feeling like something was wrong with the guild just in terms of our culture and leadership.”
In 2019, members fired their agents en masse as a show of solidarity as the guild waged a campaign against talent agencies that refused to get on board with the WGA’s then-newly revised Code of Conduct, which banned packaging fees and required agencies to sever their ties to affiliated production entities.
The fight lasted nearly two years before the last of the major agencies finally caved. WGA West leadership swiftly branded this a victory for the union, citing solidarity among the membership as a unifying force that proved the “strength and resolve” of the guild. It set the stage for the overwhelming approval of a strike authorization in 2023 just one month into contract negotiations with the AMPTP.
“There was no dialogue. There was no conversation. As a result, we ended up with a radical objective, which was to get rid of packaging entirely, as opposed to what we should have been doing, which is fixing packaging so that it works as well for the writers as it was working for the agents,” Guggenheim told Deadline. “The way I describe the ATA action is that the guild shot itself in the head and then congratulated themselves on having perfect aim.”
One veteran writer, speaking on the condition of anonymity called the agency campaign “a slap in the face” that many members privately believed would backfire, but few were willing to say so in public. Recalling a WGAW event shortly before the mass firing, the source says they asked about “whether this might not work and whether there was another way to handle it.”
Full article:
https://deadline.com/2026/04/wga-west-writer-complaints-about-guild-staff-strike-1236770972/
ATA has learned that SAG-AFTRA may return to bargaining with the AMPTP later this month.