2025 Council Election: E-Blast # 1

Fellow WGA Members,

We are a union of writers. A guild of storytellers. Yet our leadership has lost the plot.

If we are to build real power and win lasting gains, the WGA must expand MBA coverage for writers across all film, television, and streaming genres. Without MBA coverage for some, there’s worse coverage for all—but our leadership has failed to deliver it, let alone acknowledge it.

My experience as a Councilmember from 2021–2023 and as a rank-and-file nonfiction organizer since 2014 made one thing abundantly clear: the WGA is not member-driven. Decisions are made from above, by entrenched officials and privileged individuals operating behind closed doors. Even with the best intentions, this structure forces leadership to act in ways contrary to members’ needs, hopes, and expectations.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have a Guild that is transparent, democratic, and truly member-driven—one where members themselves set the direction of our struggles, priorities, and goals.

Strikes alone cannot build lasting power if leadership refuses to expand MBA coverage across all genres. Lasting power comes not only from what we demand, but from how we organize to achieve it: internally, through democratic control and transparency within our union, and externally, by broadening MBA coverage so all writers can stand united against the studios.

True strength comes when every writer is organized, every member can help shape and oversee organizing, and every writer is covered under one contract and able to stand together in reciprocal solidarity—not superficially, but concretely.

That’s why I’m running for Council again: to help build the solidarity and accountability our Guild has been missing. I believe in reciprocal solidarity—solidarity that means standing together materially across all film, television, and streaming genres, withholding our labor when we, the members, deem it necessary and appropriate, and ensuring no writer is left behind. That is how we build real power.

When we fight for all writers collectively, as a union, we also protect the space for each of us to grow individually, as a guild—by safeguarding our work and honing our craft, preserving artistic freedom and integrity, and preventing studios from devaluing our stories or dividing us through coverage gaps that undermine our creative pursuits.

I ask for your vote to help put members back at the center of our union and ensure that our guild lives up to its name.

For more information about my campaign, I encourage you to read my 2025 Council Candidate Statement in full. And if you’d like to help transform the WGA into the member-driven union we need, reach out to the Writers Guild Autonomous Rank-and-file Caucus (WGARC)—a platform for members on both coasts to confront structural issues and organize internally. Our goal is to establish transparency, accountability, and democratic control as the prerequisites for building reciprocal solidarity in our union.

In true solidarity,

Benjamin Rosenblum