WGA announces end to Hollywood writers' strike

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- The Writers Guild of America (WGA) announced here on Saturday an end to the protracted strike launched by Hollywood writers which lasted for more than three months.

"We have a tentative deal," said Patric Verrone and Michael Winship, the two WGA leaders, in a joint letter released to union members early in the morning.

The tentative deal includes a doubling of the residual rate for movies and TV shows sold online and secures the union's jurisdiction over content created specifically for the Web, above certain budget thresholds.

Like directors, writers also would get a 3.5 percent increase in minimum pay rates for television and film work.

Rank and file writers will gather on both the East and West Coasts later in the day to get a look at the contract offer that could end the three-month-long strike that has idled most television and film production. A show-of-hands could end the strike immediately, some union officials said.

The proposed deal would run through May, 2011 and would give scale writers raises of at least 3 percent per year.

The deal designates the WGA "as the exclusive bargaining representative for writing for new media," the letter said.

The proposed contract "protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery," the letter said.

"It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that 'when they get paid, we get paid.'"

The two presidents also said "an ongoing struggle against seven, multinational media conglomerates, no matter how successful, is exhausting, taking an enormous personal toll on our members and countless others ..."

"Continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks," they said. "The time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike."

So far there was no comment from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the TV networks and big movie studios.

The AMPTP estimates the strike, which began Nov. 5, has cost WGA members an estimated 273 million U.S. dollars in wages. And because production virtually ceased, the AMPTP claims other production workers represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees have lost an estimated 471 million dollars.