Writers Guild of America

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is the joint label under which two independent sister labour unions — the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW), headquartered in Los Angeles, and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), headquartered in New York City — represent the writers of motion pictures, television, radio, news, and online media in the United States. Combined membership across the two unions sits at roughly 24,500 writers as of 2025 (about 17,000 in WGAW and 7,592 in WGAE). The WGA sits inside this corpus as the writer-side institutional anchor of the 2023 Hollywood writers'-and-actors' strike that produced the first major US collective-bargaining settlement to bind generative AI in enforceable contract language, and as the standing US creative-industry advocacy vehicle whose Article 5 (Artificial Intelligence) template — the four protections, the disclosure regime, and the reserved training-data rights — has been taken up across sectoral peers as the working model for worker AI rights in employment.

Founding and structure

The modern Writers Guild of America was established in 1954 through a reorganisation that consolidated the existing screen, radio, and television writer unions into the present dual-guild structure. Its lineage runs back to the Screen Writers Guild, founded in 1921 in Hollywood and increasingly active in industrial bargaining from 1933 onward. The 1954 reorganisation produced the Writers Guild of America, West as the Los Angeles-headquartered union, with a current membership of approximately 17,000 (11,799 full members, 5,664 other-classification members), based at 7000 W 3rd Street, Los Angeles. The same reorganisation established the Writers Guild of America, East as the New York City-headquartered sister union, with 7,592 members in 2025 based at 250 Hudson Street; WGAE joined the AFL-CIO in 1989, an affiliation WGAW has not taken up, and maintains a separate International Affiliation of Writers Guilds membership.

The two unions are independent, but operate together for almost all functions a writer or a studio cares about. The Mississippi River sets jurisdiction: writers working west of it join WGAW, those east join WGAE, with WGAW the larger of the two on the strength of Hollywood's geographic concentration. Both unions run the WGA Awards together (since 1949), conduct joint screenwriting-credit determinations, share a common script-registration service, and — critically for the corpus — negotiate the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) as a single bargaining unit and conduct strike actions jointly. References to "the WGA" in industrial-relations contexts typically refer to this joint negotiating posture rather than to a single corporate entity.

Leadership

The two unions elect separate presidents and governance bodies. As of 2025, WGAW is led by President Meredith Stiehm, Vice President Travis Donnelly, and Secretary/Treasurer Peter Murrieta, with Ellen Stutzman as Executive Director (having succeeded David Young in November 2023) and Tony Segall as General Counsel. WGAE is led by President Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and Vice President Erica Saleh. The 2023 MBA Negotiating Committee that conducted the AI-track bargaining and led the strike to settlement was co-chaired by David A. Goodman and Chris Keyser, with Stutzman as Chief Negotiator (succeeding David Young in February 2023), and comprised 27 members drawn from both unions including David Simon, Michael Schur, and James Schamus.

Generative-AI advocacy

The WGA's AI work is the single most consequential post-2010 programme the joint guilds have run and the reason for the union's inclusion in this corpus. It has three overlapping legs: the 2023 MBA Article 5 bargaining track; the standing post-MBA programme on AI-and-writing built around the WGAW AI Advisory Committee; and a federal- and state-policy track on AI training data and creator rights.

The 2023 MBA Article 5 (Artificial Intelligence)

The union's 2023 strike against the AMPTP — covered in detail in the corpus's joint WGA / SAG-AFTRA AI-provisions campaign entry — opened on 2 May 2023 and ran for 148 days, the second-longest WGA strike, ending on 27 September 2023 with a tentative agreement on 24 September. The strike was preceded by a 97.85% strike-authorisation vote on 18 April 2023 and was conducted as a joint WGAE / WGAW action covering some 11,500 screenwriters. The membership ratified the resulting MBA on 9 October 2023 by 99%; the contract took effect 25 September 2023 and is stated to expire on 1 May 2026, framing the union's 2026 successor-contract round.

Article 5 of the resulting MBA — the four-clause core that has since been the most widely reproduced part of any US AI-and-labour contract — provides as follows. First, no form of AI, generative or otherwise, is a writer, and AI-generated material is neither "literary material" nor "source material" under the MBA: a structural choice that, as the Center for Democracy and Technology has argued, organises the contract around authorship rather than AI capability and makes the template unusually portable to non-Hollywood worker contexts. Second, writers may choose to use AI only with company consent and under company policy, but the company cannot require them to use it. Third, any AI-generated or AI-incorporating material provided to a writer must be disclosed. Fourth, the Guild reserves the right to assert that exploitation of writers' material to train AI is prohibited by the MBA or other law — preserving, rather than resolving, the training-data question. The MBA also obliges each signatory company to meet with the Guild at least semi-annually to discuss its use and intended use of generative AI in motion-picture development and production. Perkins Coie's legal analysis treats Article 5 alongside the SAG-AFTRA digital-replica taxonomy as the two pillars of the 2023 cycle's AI architecture.

The post-MBA programme: AI Advisory Committee and member guidance

Inside the MBA's four-year term the Guild has built a standing AI-and-writing programme around the WGAW AI Advisory Committee, which collects member experience with company AI use, AI-in-writers'-room incidents, and contract-enforcement edge cases, and feeds them into the Guild's bargaining preparation for the 2026 round. The Guild's own Writers and Artificial Intelligence member guide — issued alongside the Know Your Rights page — translates the Article 5 minimums into specific recommendations on individual contracts, on the Guild's own model contract clauses, and on how members should respond if a company asks them to work with AI-generated material. The programme is the proximate vehicle by which the WGA tracks whether the MBA's clauses are holding in practice, and is the source of the Guild's December 2024 letters to studio CEOs demanding cessation of training-data scraping of Guild members' material.

Federal- and state-policy advocacy on AI training data

The Guild's policy track outside the MBA is built around copyright and AI training data. The Guild has co-filed amicus briefs in AI-training copyright litigation, has supported California Assembly Bill 412 — the proposed state law requiring AI developers to disclose how copyrighted materials trained their systems — and has positioned itself alongside the Authors Guild and other US sectoral creative-industry organisations as a public voice on training-data licensing and disclosure regimes. The Guild's statement on the 2023 WGA agreement, taken up by the Authors Guild as a model for its own AI advocacy in publishing, is one of the clearest expressions of the sectoral wave the corpus tracks: a federation of US creative-industry unions, each carrying the Article 5 template into their own contracts and policy work.

Position in the corpus

The WGA sits in this corpus as the writer-side institutional counterpart to SAG-AFTRA: together the two unions carried out the 2023 joint Hollywood bargaining round — the first joint WGA / SAG-AFTRA work stoppage since 1960 — whose AI provisions are this corpus's anchor instance of US creative-industry labour organising securing contractual protections against AI in employment. Where SAG-AFTRA's distinctive contribution to the corpus is the digital-replica taxonomy and the consent-and-compensation framework for performer likeness, the WGA's distinctive contribution is the Article 5 authorship architecture: a contract that resolves AI's labour-side question by re-asserting who counts as a writer, rather than by attempting to regulate AI capabilities. Alongside the Authors Guild — whose publishing-side AI advocacy track has cited the WGA MBA as its template — and the Concept Art Association, the WGA forms part of the wider sectoral wave of US creative-industry professional-community organising on generative AI that the corpus is mapping, and that international labour commentary has pointed to as a model for worker AI rights beyond Hollywood. The 1 May 2026 expiry of the current MBA, together with the SAG-AFTRA contract's parallel 2026 cycle, opens the second round of bargaining the WGA will conduct on the AI track — this time on the basis of two-and-a-half years of lived contractual experience rather than from a standing start.