As WGA and Hollywood Employers Meet at Bargaining Table, are British Writers Contemplating Labor Action of Their Own?
K.J. Yossman As negotiations between the WGA and the studios and streamers gather steam, the reverberations are being felt well beyond the confines of Sherman Oaks where the sides are sitting down to wrangle over complicated issues at stake. Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the Atlantic, questions are already being asked about what impact a WGA strike may have in the U.K. – and whether British writers, who harbor many of the same concerns as their American counterparts, could ever stage a strike. “The problems that U.K. writers and U.S. writers face are basically the same,” says Robert Taylor, a lawyer and screenwriter who also acts as a legal advisor to the Writers Guild of Great Britain (WGGB). “The things in the U.S. strike about not getting paid enough by the streaming services, the things about mini [writers’] rooms and the writers being expected to contribute for small amounts of money and then being dropped, not being taken forward into the series, it’s exactly the same in the U.K.”