WGA Wants to Shun Strike-Ditching Writers

The vast majority of the WGA's 12,000-plus members patiently stayed away from their word processors during the recent three-month writers strike, notwithstanding dwindling finances or a threat to their careers. But a few members decided to go "financial-core," an irreversible decision that made them only limited, non-voting members of the guild and allowed them to return to work. (This, if you recall, is the move George Clooney made, before the strike, in response to the WGA's decision to deny him credit for the Leatherheads screenplay.)

On Friday, the WGA sent a letter to its membership that praised the writers for refusing to work, "[i]n the face of enormous personal and financial hardship," for the good of the union. It then went on to chastise those "puny few" who "consciously and selfishly decided to place their own narrow interests over the greater good." It urged that these writers "must be held at arm's length by the rest of us, and held accountable for what they are -- strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk." The letter ended with a link to a website containing the names of the 21 writers who opted to become financial-core members.
The letter, which David Poland has posted in full here, is pretty stunning as an overt attempt to essentially blacklist (or at least ostracize) a small group of people. The fact that all but one (John Ridley, of Undercover Brother fame) are writers staffed on soap operas suggests that soap scribes might have been in a different situation than everyone else, though I can only speculate as to why that would be. (Maybe they're a dime a dozen, and a refusal to work would have been career suicide?) In any event, though the letter is an entertaining read, it doesn't convince me that these 21 people deserve to be run out of town on a rail. Might there have been exigent circumstances?