Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

My name is Megan Arow.

And this is a script notes sidecast, a short episode about a timely topic.

Today that timely topic is answering listener questions about the upcoming

WJ contract negotiations. And here's where I need to say if you are not a WJ member,

or if you're not really interested in WJ stuff, you can absolutely skip this episode.

I promise, Megan, this will not be on the final.

Megan, how should we even get started? What should we do?

I thought we'd begin with a 101 for listeners who might not have any idea what this is or means.

Yeah, absolutely. So all the writing that Craig and I do for film and TV is done under the

auspices of the writer's Guild of America. It is a union, technically two unions, one for the west,

one for the east, that bargains with our employers about how much writers are paid, the minimums

were paid at least. Along with our pension, health insurance, paid family leave, it is all the

normal union stuff. It also collects residuals for writers, which are those payments for our work

when it's reused. Now a lot of countries have their own equivalent writers guilds, but the US is

unique in that ours is genuinely a union that is negotiating with our employers. So all those

rates and rules are set out in a document called the MBA, the minimum basic agreement.

It is a contract between the writers guild and our employers and truly all of our employers

as WJ members, we are not allowed to do any film or TV work for any company that is not as

technatory to the MBA. Now those companies as a whole gather them all up together. That is

the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. And you can really just think

of the AMPTP as the studios, which includes Netflix, Apple, Amazon, all the streamers, all

...