STRIKE COVERAGE: AMPTP Accuses WGA of Blacklisting Tactics

Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Rips Writers Guild of America for Encouraging Reporting of Strike-Breaking Activities

By Ben Grossman -- Broadcasting & Cable, 11/13/2007 7:49:00 PM

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers Tuesday fired back at the Writers Guild of America for sending out information on how to report strike-breaking activities by guild members.

“The WGA is using fear and intimidation to control its membership,” AMPTP president Nick Counter said in a statement. “Asking members to inform on each other and creating a blacklist of those who question the tactics of the WGA leadership is as unacceptable today as it was when the WGA opposed these tactics in the 1950s.”

The WGA produced information that can be found now on its Web site under the headline, “How to File a Report of Strike-Breaking or Scab Writing.”

"Mr. Counter's charge is as offensive as it is untrue," the WGA responded in a statement late Tuesday night. "To accuse the Writers Guild of America of blacklisting, when it was we who suffered the most from it in the past, is simply Mr. Counter's desperate attempt to divert attention from the fact that it was he who walked out of the negotiations, and it is he who refuses every day to return to the table.  The WGA has an offer on the table and is ready and willing to meet with the AMPTP any day, anywhere."

The WGA West, which has a Strike Rules Compliance Committee, has a phone number for members to report other members.

The WGA said the 12-person committee’s mission is “to discourage violations of the Guild's strike rules by investigating allegations that writers are undermining our strike efforts by engaging in strike-breaking activities or scab writing and, in appropriate instances, by recommending action against such writers. By doing so, we hope first and foremost to discourage such writers from breaking the strike rules.”

WGA leadership on Tuesday condemned a Young and the Restless writer for crossing the picket line, a development first reported in Variety.

For a gallery of photos from the picket line, click here.

For full coverage of the strike, click here.