India’s Screenwriters Association Amongst Several Guilds Commanding Members To End Work On U.S. Films And Shows Amid Strike 

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has garnered attention from other film industry unions around the world.

India’s Screenwriters Association (SWA) is offering support to the thousands of WGA members and has asked its own members “to down tools on U.S. films and series,” as per Deadline. 

SWA, which is India’s major industry guild for writers, emailed over 57,000 of its members on Thursday, explaining the WGA’s reason for calling the strike and to inform them that the association “stands in complete solidarity with our 11,500 sisters and brothers of WGA.”

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“We ask all SWA members working on U.S. shows and films to strengthen their protest by stopping work on those, and to not accept any new writing work from the companies in the US affiliated to AMPTP [Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” SWA said in an email signed by its General Secretary, Zaman Habib.

The email continued: “If the WGA strike succeeds, it helps our efforts, by setting a precedent. After all, we shall be negotiating with the Indian subsidiaries of some of those companies.”

While SWA is putting a halt to working on U.S. shows and films, the association is not asking its members to stop work on shows produced by the Indian subsidiaries of companies such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon, Deadline reports, as clarified by former screenwriter and SWA Executive Committee member, Anjum Rajabali.

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However, according to Rajabali, Indian writers are facing more extensive issues than those of their U.S. counterparts, to which the SWA is currently in the works of drafting a Minimum Basic Contract for its members. The association has also taken initiative to negotiate standard clauses with producers. Due to the country’s lack of an industry-wide producers’ body to negotiate with, like the AMPTP, the SWA has been conducting individual meetings with major producers.

“The challenges faced by Indian writers are even more acute,” the SWA pointed out in its email to its members. “Grossly unfair contracts, no credit guarantee, undignified low fees (especially for new writers), one-sided termination clauses, impossible indemnity demands, no buy-back clause among others.”

In addition to SWA, other screenwriters guilds around the globe, including the Writers Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), Writers Guild of Canada (WGC) and Australia Writers Guild (AWG), have expressed support to WGA members and asked their respective members to down tools on U.S. shows.