WGA Fires Up the Crucible

Last Friday, the Writers Guild of America sent a letter to union members naming the 28 scribes who chose financial-core status and kept working during the 100-day strike. When a member elects financial-core status, it means they resign from the union, but can still work a union job as long as they still pay most of their dues; they cannot hold office or vote in elections or on contracts. "Going fi-core," in union parlance, is the writers' right, backed by federal law. Nevertheless, Patric Verrone and Michael Winship, presidents of WGA West and WGA East, not only outed the offending writers, but seemed to threaten them as well.

"...Among the many there were a puny few... who consciously and selfishly decided to place their own narrow interests over the greater good," they wrote. "This handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be held at arm's length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are--strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk."

The "must be held at arm's length" was a curious phrase. Are Verrone and Winship calling for those writers, most of whom work on soaps, to be blacklisted? One wonders how the National Labor Relations Board might react if the writers were denied work in the future, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has the same concerns.

"By publicly naming names and encouraging people who have the power to hire writers to keep them 'at arm's length,' and saying they must be 'judged accountable' it is clear the WGA leadership is seeking to deny employment to these writers in the future," the AMPTP stated in a news release today. "That is a direct violation of federal labor law, and as the employers of those writers we have a responsibility to defend them and the rule of law in this case."

(SAG has also rattled the saber toward actors who go fi-core, but it's not the same as this. First, SAG hasn't named names; second, writers are much more likely to have the title of director or executive producer and thus the power to hire and fire.)

One would think the WGA, of all institutions, would be sensitive to the idea of naming names and blacklisting. I mean, what is the guild going to do next? Throw a big party and give some award to a famous names-namer?

Oh, wait. That's exactly what they're going to do, when they give Budd Schulberg a lifetime achievement award on Wednesday afternoon in L.A.

Okay. Maybe that's an unfair comparison. And it's not easy to judge those who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare--many of us would like to think we would have been Arthur Miller rather than Schulberg or Clifford Odets; we like to think we would have stood tall and did as Woody Allen's character did in The Front, telling the Red-baiting, witch-hunting congressmen where to get off. But for those of us who weren't there, those who were never in a position to run the risks or weigh the stakes, we have no idea.

By that standard, though, the same has to hold true when considering the 28 writers who elected financial-core status. I'm willing to bet their decisions didn't have as much to do with selfishness as they had to do with self-interest, which is not necessarily the same thing. After all, we don't know the health of 28 writers or 28 families, the condition of 28 homes or 28 bank accounts. The only things Verrone and Winship told us were their names.

I'm willing to make another bet: Verrone and Winship don't know much about those individuals either, because this isn't about 28 soap scribes who went fi-core. This is about the other 10,000 or so WGA members that, they fear, are thinking of doing the same thing.  This is a straight-up, arm-breaking scare tactic to keep people in line (which I believe was one of Terry Malloy's jobs in On the Waterfront, Schulberg's signature work, itself the reverse parable of Miller's The Crucible).

If there are 10,500 WGA members, and only one-quarter of 1 percent of them went fi-core during the strike, how well-founded is Verrone and Winship's fear? Worse, if we learned anything from the McCarthy Era (or our present one) it's this: leaders who propagate fear diminish all involved, not least the principles and institutions they are trying to protect.

--Andrew Salomon