Monday, December 03, 2012
WGA: Stop Writing for Comedy Central
Hollywood Reporter: The WGA West on Monday issued a stop-work order against Central Productions, the production unit of Comedy Central, telling members in a letter that the company repeatedly had misrepresented to writers that projects were guild-covered when they were not.
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5 comments:
It worries me that a company would feel the need to lie to their writers about guild coverage. Not only is it illegal and unfair, it makes me wonder what it was that made Central Productions lie about it; if they were hiding something or whatever. I hope the writing block fixes this forever.
I really hope this gets addressed relatively soon. Over the years Comedy Central has become one of the only channels on television that continues to speak the truth about the worlds going-on's with the use of amazing humor. Interestingly enough, even though Comedy Central has headquarters and studios in NY and LA, must of their shows, such as South Park and Workaholics, are produced and created independently of Comedy Central. This might provide a lesser blow to the company if the WGA were to go on strike as many of the top shows are not associated directly with Comedy Central
Considering the personas and views represented through the company's programming, it is surprising to find they are the brand that is trying to undermine unions. I suppose the people at the top may not be in alignment with many of the views expressed in their programming, but as such a large corporation, there is certainly the money to go around to afford reasonable pay wages and benefits. The agreements made on non-animated shows that was put into place over the last four years is great, but it seems like this is how the deception is being brought about. I could imagine if all of one genre of work was union, and then say one year the producers decided to make just a few shows non-WGA and did not tell anyone, I could see how the writers could fall into this trap. But it sounds like this is not what happened. I hope more comes out on this story because I almost feel like it was a mis-understanding that snowballed that I know many would like to see resolved.
Is it really that surprising that a major network would try to pull one over on their employees? They can not be the only one trying to get more profits by disregarding union rules. Just as in every major industry there will be people that try to get one over on you and you can not stop that. The WGA union writers seem not to have noticed or been aware enough to look for fraud coming at them from Comedy Central. While I agree that people need to be forthright about contracts, until they get caught in the act they will continue to try to pay people as little as possible.
We have been learning a lot about unions in class lately, so it is interesting to see an example of a union playing out in the real world. In this case, I think they are definitely working efficiently to protect the writers. It is strange that a company would have to lie about being guild covered when they weren't, but there are some potential reasons for it. When you are covered by a certain union, there are certain standards you have to abide by. When a writer sees that a company is not guild covered, they may become nervous that these standards are not going to be met, and therefore not want to word there. Then the company would be losing business to guild covered companies. So, this is definitely wrong, but I can potentially fathom what motivated them to do this.
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