In an interview, Chris Keyser and Meredith Stiehm discussed turning points and sticking points in the talks, how the entrance of CEOs changed the conversation and what the union will fight for next time around.
So how did the pact come together? In an interview on Tuesday night, the union’s negotiating committee co-chair Chris Keyser and union president Meredith Stiehm offered their take, noting that once four top executives — Disney’s Bob Iger, NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley, Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos — entered the room on Sept. 20, the parties took only days to come to terms.
How do you feel at this moment, now that you’ve have taken this big step towards ending the Writers Guild of America’s second-longest strike in history?Relieved and happy and proud. It’s been a very long road and I’m proud of this membership for hanging in there and this NegCom [negotiating committee] for staying with it and we really got the deal we feel like we held out for and writers needed.
What were the significant turning points in the negotiation, in your view, that led to real progress?Well, first of all, I would say there’s one thing that wasn’t a turning point but was consistent all the way through, which was the membership solidarity and the commitment to solving these problems that we’d said from the very beginning were existential for us and that we could not leave this contract negotiation without a solution for, so that’s the first thing.
Meredith, is there anything else you want to add there — maybe any turning points in the negotiating room as well?Well, I mean, looking back, kind of zooming out at the whole 148 days, it became very clear that the AMPTP process was not functional and that it was really a failed process to have spent so much time with them and working with them and they have sort of old strategies that they’ve been using for decades.
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