Dispatches From The Picket Lines, Day 52: NYC Pols Back Striking Writers At City Hall Rally

deadline.com:

Spike Lee was not on the speakers list at a rally Thursday morning for striking film and television writers outside City Hall in New York.

But one of the Brooklyn-born filmmaker’s best-loved movies, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, kept cropping up as local elected officials took turns calling for studio executives to resume negotiations with the Writers Guild of America and help end a strike now in its eighth week. “Eight weeks is too long — It’s time for a fair contract,” said Carmen De La Rosa, one of 12 elected members of New York’s 51-seat City Council who spoke at a demonstration in downtown Manhattan organized by the WGA East.

De La Rosa on Thursday introduced a formal resolution that her colleagues will vote on calling for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to resume “good faith” negotiations with the WGA and settle their differences equitably.

Or as other speakers put it, “Do the right thing.”  With more than 100 demonstrators looking on from inside City Hall Park, De La Rosa reeled off the core demands of the guild’s 11,500 striking members: more pay in the form of residuals for streaming television programming, limits on the use of artificial intelligence to generate content and a return to the traditional writers rooms that produce scripts while apprenticing younger hires.  “These are all reasonable demands,” she said, especially in what she called “a union town.” At a rally bracketed by two others on the same plaza that called for more affordable housing, speakers also connected the writers strike to a larger middle-class struggle to get by in one of the world’s most expensive cities. “You need not only a fair contract, you need to be able to live in New York City,” said Council Member Gale