WGA Strike to End Wednesday After Tentative Agreement Reached

Hollywood is about to see the end of a historic labor dispute. The Writers Guild of America's 148-day strike will end on Wednesday, 12:01 a.m. PT, following a vote from guild leadership in which around 11,500 of the guild's members were officially authorized to return to work following the union's protests, reported The Hollywood Reporter.

Pitching, selling scripts, taking meetings, responding to notes, which have been forbidden by strike rules for months, will now be sanctioned, while writers' rooms can resume their meetings after weeks of being prohibited. "This allows writers to return to work during the ratification process but does not affect the membership's right to make a final determination on contract approval," a statement by the WGA negotiating committee was released on Tuesday after it was unanimously voted to lift the "restraining order" by the WGA West Board and the WGA East Council.

According to the negotiators, the end of the strike does not necessarily mean that the tentative agreement reached by the union with studios and streamers on Sunday night is guaranteed to hold. It is still necessary for union members to vote to ratify the contract, a referendum slated to occur between Oct. 2 and Oct. 9.  

Throughout the coming days, members will be invited to attend informational meetings on the new deal, which will take place in New York, Los Angeles and over Zoom, according to the outlet. As a result of the union's lengthy work stoppage, leaders are likely to try to sell the deal to their members and argue that this gave the union the power to demand these conditions from major industry employers for its members.

After an entire weekend of working on a new three-year contract, studios and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers finally announced the tentative agreement on Sunday night. There had been a stalemate in negotiations for about a month, but as of Sept. 20, negotiations intensified at the Sherman Oaks headquarters of AMPTP and with several major names in the entertainment industry (Disney's Bob Iger and Netflix's Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav and NBCUniversal's Donna Langley) attending. 

In the presence of top executives, the studios changed their positions on issues like staffing levels in television writers' rooms and rewarding writers for the success of streaming projects, per The Hollywood Reporter. By Sunday night, the two sides had compromised on artificial intelligence regulations, which proved to be a long-standing sticking point. According to the WGA, in a communication they sent out to members on Sunday regarding the agreement, the resulting agreement was "exceptional."

On Tuesday, there was an approval of the deal by both the WGA West Board and the WGA East Council, which took the vote to end the restraining order against AMPTP member companies one step closer to being implemented. In the short term, the news represents the end of one-half of one of the longest labor strikes to hit Hollywood, a double strike that hasn't been seen in over 60 years. SAG-AFTRA remains on strike, and neither the union nor the AMPTP have announced any further dates for the parties to begin bargaining.