Writers Guild Awards Cancelled In LA Over Staffers’ Strike

With 115 Writers Guild of America staffers still on strike after months of contract talks with the writers’ union led to no deal, the WGA West has cancelled its annual Writers Guild Awards.

Union president Michele Mulroney informed presenters scheduled to appear at the March 8 ceremony at the JW Marriott Hotel of the cancellation in a memo Sunday morning. This past Tuesday, the Writers Guild Staff Union revealed in an Instagram post that the guild had refused to bargain further on its first union contract and warned them that the awards ceremony would be cancelled if the WGSU did not agree to the previous contract offer by Friday.

“Make no mistake: This is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between union staff and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of (studio negotiations),” WGSU said in the post.

115 WGAW staffers unionized in April 2025 with the Pacific Northwest Staffers Union (PNWSU), seeking its first union contract with WGAW by the end of that year. Instead, WGSU went on strike on February 17, accusing WGAW of “surface-level bargaining” and unfair labor practices, filing a formal complaint to the National Labor Relations Board on the latter.

Among the issues the WGSU is looking to address in the contract is protections against the use of artificial intelligence software to surveil employees and monitor performance. They are also seeking a standardized system of just cause protections, including due process through arbitration.

The staffers are also calling for union scale wage with larger annual increases than what writers receive in their contract with Hollywood studios, something that the WGSU said is necessary because unlike writers, they do not have agents to negotiate over-scale pay.

This past Tuesday, dozens of WGA members joined the WGSU in solidarity on the picket line at the WGAW headquarters on Fairfax, with an estimated 120 people taking part between the two sides. WGAW captains at the picket line told TheWrap that the 2023 writers’ strike had built close relationships between union members and the staffers who helped oversee the logistics of the work stoppage.

“We would not have survived the 2023 strike without the staffers. They were the first to show up on the picket lines before any writers showed up and they were the last to leave at the end of the day,” said Jackie Penn, vice chair of the WGAW Committee for Black Writers.

The Writers Guild of America East will continue its own awards ceremony in New York.

More to come…

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