We’re sure you haven’t yet lost sight of the turbulent strike climate that rocked the entertainment industry last year. We can forgive you if the rather anticlimactic DGA contract renegotiations that also took place last year have fallen off your radar. Now, almost 7 months after they quietly secured a deal with the AMPTP, i.e. major Hollywood studios, they have taken a leaf from the WGA’s playbook with a retroactive reworking of the deal to echo some of the terms secured by the WGA. Blake & Wang P.A. entertainment lawyer, Brandon Blake, examines the new gains in detail for us.
Brandon Blake
Improved Employer Contribution Rates
While not quite what the WGA had hoped for, the so-called ‘streaming bonus,’ alongside expanded access to transparent viewership data from streaming platforms, was a cornerstone success of the deal they did secure. While the Guild was quick to note that it will not have a major impact on most DGA members, it does now bring the deal they secured better into line with the expanded residual model Hollywood Unions are fighting for. As with the WGA deal, this means that there will be additional compensation on offer to the directors of streaming titles that surpass a specific viewership metric over a season. As with the WGA itself, the DGA was quick to note that this part of the deal, while not exactly what the unions were hoping for, sets the stage for further negotiations in the future, too. In addition to the similar streaming residual deal that the WGA worked out, the DGA also announced that contribution rates to their health and pension plans would increase by 0.5% in the second and third years of the contract. This builds on pay increases for high-end SVOD and dramatic Pay TV directors. Reduced rates for early episodes will not apply going forward, working out to around a 5% increase in pay. Weekly caps on daily production fees for non-primetime TV will also fall away.
The No-Strike Guild
While SAG-AFTRA, the WGA, and the DGA all had contractual renegotiations with the major studio players last year, the DGA was the only guild not to head to the picket line. While the deal they initially secured took some heat at the time, it was ratified by over 87% of DGA members. It also spared them from the 148 days (WGA) and 118 days (SAG-AFTRA) of extended strike action we saw rock the Hollywood labor pool last year.
It is far from unusual in entertainment spaces for unions to gain these similar provisions if a peer union has managed them. What is notable is doing so off contract-negotiation time. Even seeking these improvements at this time was quite a bold move on the DGA’s part. There may be some criticism ahead from their sister Guilds, too, given the commentary the DGA faced at the time for forgoing union solidarity on the picket lines. Such petty squabbles aside, however, it is always good to see a unified labor front in the entertainment sphere. Given some of the impracticalities of the new streaming bonus model (which we have looked at in greater depth in the past), it will be interesting to see how it performs as an industry-wide ‘standard’ of sorts in the coming years.
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