Thread by @AoDespair

A last thread on the last day of voting in the #WGAE election:
First, if you are a member of our union and you have not exercised your franchise, do vote today. But I'm actually going to here eschew any last appeal for my ticket or any critique of the opposition.
Instead...

...I'm going to deliver a shard of wisdom for which I have to credit Bernard Simon, who on many occasions managed to hold back when his hot-headed progeny was ready to war.
"What do you do when you have a guy in the corner," he once asked me when I did have a guy in the corner.

"You let him out."
The fact is, I have no clue who has who in the corner in this election. The faction arguing for WGAE to become an industrial union of writers in all sectors is mobilized and effective. My own ticket, those arguing that the WGAE can't be sustained...

...as an amalgamated umbrella when the larger WGAW offers screen and television writers an inevitable home if and when the East Coast unit ceases to speak explicitly and comprehensively for their interests has also waged an aggressive campaign.

When the votes are counted, one side or the other may delight themselves with the notion that the election has settled the problem.
But either way that will be bullshit.
Either way, the same essential process will have to begin. Either way, the same inevitable...

....outcome will need to be reached and it will involve both sides going into the same room and negotiating toward the same elemental outcome. If our opponents are successful in this election and think that...

...the victory has delivered an amalgamated and solvent WGAE, they're walking a bad road. And if my ticket is successful and we think for a minute that we are not still required to subsidize and support a future of...

...organizing of writers in other, more vulnerable sectors -- and that the failure to do so will not waste five years of effective unionizing that has benefitted all writers, then shame on us.

With either outcome tonight, the same two factions are going to have to go into the same room and cobble together the same solution: In order for the WGAE to survive, freelance and TV writers are going to have to be assured that their leadership will be...

...heard and seriously regarded by the much larger WGAW, that they are contributing to a union that provides the same support of their fundamental interests as they might receive if they simply enrolled in the West. Certainly, the WGAW has historically...

...seen little sense in the maintenance of a separate East Coast unit of film and TV screenwriters; their argument that there should be a single WGA will be renewed -- and heeded -- once the East Coast contingent finds itself in a minority within its own unit.

And from the other perspective, it is entirely intolerable for digital journalists and other members in other writing sectors to find themselves circumscribed in their union, to see the continued organizing of their sectors impeded or restrained. They need a full-throated union..

...speaking for them as well. More than that, as that organizing continues, those members need to be assured that the resources of the WGAE -- which began this campaign in earnest -- remain committed to the task at hand, that we not quit what we started. The argument that all...

...those who lift a pen anywhere are part and parcel of the same industry is lofty sloganeering, but untrue. I work in an industry with members of SAG, the DGA, IATSE and the Teamsters who share more of my absolute interests than digital journalists. But...

...the argument that writers can move from one industry to another, and that all scribblers benefit when every sector in which our craft engages is unionized, holds a hell of a lot of water. What the WGAE started needs to be finished.

To address both realities, the same two sides -- whoever wins, and whoever loses tonight -- will need to get into a room, shoulder by shoulder, and achieve either a new bifurcated governing structure so that the WGAE can continue to speak for screen, TV and radio scriptwriters...

...with the same authority and aggressiveness as it has for its history -- and be heard not only by the studios and networks, but by its larger sister union. And digital members need to know the new structure provides a home under which they can continue...

...to organize aggressively and saturate their sectors. And both sides need to emerge with the confidence that the new construct will hold and keep the East solvent. The only viable alternative is to spin the digital units into a separate union entirely -- but to do so with...

...guarantees of subsidy and support that assure the survival of the new entity and its ability to grow. And with either solution, the WGAE needs to be talking to the NewsGuild about a plan to actually organize that which we claim is organized labor.

Digital journalists -- especially those who write prose -- are in fact the essential future of the NewsGuild. No one is going to cutting down trees and throwing them on doorsteps for much longer. We should have been talking to the NG five years ago; we need to start.

The point is that either side, emerging victorious, will still have to confront the same forces in play, the same realities that come with that victory. In the end, we are all going to be in the same room, staring at the same problems, requiring the same challenges.

Tonight, when they count the votes, some of your brothers and sisters in this union are going to feel cornered. The trick is to let them out -- and then do the same thing you will have to do regardless: Talk.