Lately I’ve been frustrated at the lack of understanding on the part of Hollywood’s Professional Opinion Havers to adequately suss our strategy and tactics. I keep stopping myself from doing this thread because, as I will explain, it doesn’t really matter to our eventual success- But we’re in a movement moment. Our labor struggle is highly visible and while our goal is a fair deal for writers, a positive side effect is modeling for others how a deeply democratic and activist union fights and (eventually) wins. So it’s helpful to that cause if -

We had a fantastic showrunner meeting this morning and twitter is aflame with talk of how writing happens all the way through television production, which is why I want to talk about screenwriter issues. Screenwriters have been coerced into performing free work for decades. @MulroneyMichele spoke powerfully in negotiations, telling real stories of these abuses, writers who had their careers threatened if they didn't do unpaid rewrites.

NOW THAT WAS A FUCKING UNION MEETING. I’m tired and blown away and this is gonna be sloppy but here goes — I really hope folks can internalize how PROFOUND it was that we had the nearly the entire Hollywood labor movement present at the Shrine tonight.

I spent the last two weeks with my gut twisted in anticipation of the AMPTP making a few moves that got us close to a deal we could take, a good deal but not good enough, with cost/benefit weights so close we'd have an incredibly difficult decision to make. That didn't happen. They made it so easy. And by making it easy, they made it clear - this is not about money. It's about their power over us. Their power to end term employment in television. Their power to coerce screenwriters into endless free work.