US film and television writers will walk out Monday

The employers and the writers remain at odds over several critical issues, including compensation to writers for DVD sales and content distributed over the Internet and other new media.

After three-and-a-half months of negotiations, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) has refused to budge on either point. Writers are paid following a formula arrived at in 1985, at a time when home video was a relatively new phenomenon. In the name of helping the companies get the video business off the ground, the Writers Guild accepted a derisory rate—in effect, a concession—set at 0.3 percent of wholesale revenues on the first $5 million, then 0.36 percent after that. The standard WGA residual rate was four times higher. As one commentator noted, the AMPTP has “been laughing all the way to the bank ever since.”

The union notes in its 2007contract proposals, “In the years since [1985], as the cost of manufacturing and distribution [of DVDs] declined to become a negligible factor, and the business model proved to be one of the most profitable of any of the segments of the entertainment business, the companies have fiercely resisted any change in this formula.” In effect, the companies have made billions at the writers’ expense