Environmental Groups File FOIA Request Over Interior Secretary’s Illegal Sale of Public Waters to Oil and Gas Industry
Legal Memo Proves Biden Administration Knew It Wasn’t Legally Forced to Conduct Sale Before Claiming It Was
Dec 13, 2021
Washington, D.C. — Environmental organizations Food & Water Watch and the Action Center on Race and the Economy, along with youth advocacy groups Earth Uprising and One Up Action, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today seeking records related to the recent leasing of more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas extraction.
The FOIA request was submitted to the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and seeks any and all communications related to the lease sale between Interior Secretary Haaland, DOI and BOEM officials, White House officials including John Kerry, Gina McCarthy, Ron Klain, David Hayes, members of Congress and their staff including Senators Manchin and Sinema, and the oil and gas industry.
Meanwhile, a newly uncovered memo indicates that the Biden administration was presented with a legal analysis confirming that it was not required to go ahead with the lease sale, just weeks before it claimed it was legally compelled to conduct the sale quickly.
The memorandum of opposition filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on August 24, 2021, the administration itself acknowledged that the court did not compel the DOI on a specific timing to resume lease sales (see page 11 of the memo here). Yet the DOI announced it would resume Lease Sale 257 a week later despite clear violations of the National Environmental Protection Act and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Both federal laws authorize the Interior Secretary to only move forward with lease sales that are in accordance with environmental safeguards and in a manner that will not cause harm to life or the environment.
“This lease sale will deepen the climate crisis and completely undermine the country’s credibility as a global climate leader. Moreover, allowing new oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters constitutes a blatant disregard for Biden’s repeated campaign pledges to halt this foolish activity. We know this action has already disillusioned many Democratic voters who were counting on serious climate action from the Biden administration. What we don’t know is why the administration went ahead with this sale without the required environmental review when it clearly knew it wasn’t compelled to do so,” said Thomas Meyer, National Organizing Manager at Food & Water Watch.
Early in his administration, President Biden issued an executive order that paused new leasing of federal lands and waters for oil and gas development to complete a comprehensive review of the impacts of offshore drilling on climate change. After a preliminary U.S. District Court decision struck down Executive Order 14008, the administration quickly backed down, claiming that its hands were tied by the court, despite filing legal briefs in ongoing litigation arguing the contrary. However, the administration has simultaneously acknowledged that it has many other legal mechanisms to prohibit new oil and gas leasing aside from the one the District Court addressed.
Today, youth climate leaders from Earth Uprising, Grounded, and One Up Action who attended COP26 also submitted a letter to Secretary Haaland urging her to reject the bids from the illegal sale of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and other major polluters. The full letter can be read here.
“The Biden Administration’s official position is that they were forced to conduct this sale by the court. But we’ve done our homework and we know that is not true. If the court did not compel the administration to sell our public waters to the very companies responsible for the climate crisis and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, then what did?” said Kevin Patel, Founder and Executive Director of One Up Action.
Public opposition to the Gulf lease sale is mounting. Over 100,000 petition signatures have been gathered and over one thousand calls were made to the DOI last week. Celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo have joined environmental groups in a social media campaign to #StopTheSale. And a lawsuit filed by EarthJustice on behalf of Healthy Gulf, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and the Center for Biological Diversity to compel Interior Secretary Deb Halaand and the DOI to comply with NEPA will be heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this Thursday, December 16.
Contact: Seth Gladstone – sgladstone@fwwatch.org
IRELAND
Protesters urge Sinn Féin to block fracking licence
Extinction Rebellion Ireland held a demonstration outside the party’s headquarters in Dublin to highlight its ‘lack of timely action’. Photo: PA Images08/12/2021 |
BY CATE MCCURRY, PA
Fracking protesters have urged Sinn Féin to block petroleum licences in Northern Ireland.
Extinction Rebellion Ireland held a demonstration outside the party’s headquarters in Dublin on Wednesday, in a bid to highlight Sinn Féin’s “lack of timely action” to prevent oil exploration and extraction of oil and gas.
Campaigners said the protest was held in solidarity with communities in Northern Ireland, along with activist groups Futureproof Clare, Shale Must Fall, LAMP Fermanagh, and Belcoo Frack Free.
Stormont Economy Minister Gordon Lyons is expected to bring forward a policy on oil and gas drilling before the end of the year.
Extinction Rebellion Ireland activists Art O’Laoghaire, Oscar Mooney and Louis Heath protest outside Sinn Fein’s Dublin HQ (Brian Lawless/PA)
While Sinn Féin last week put forward a Bill which would outlaw the exploration and extraction of petroleum by fracking, it has been criticised by campaign groups.
Oscar Mooney, of Extinction Rebellion Ireland, said: “Fracking is a dangerous practice that destroys environments, communities, and is a violation of human rights.
“In Sinn Féin’s election manifesto they stated they would secure ‘a total ban on fracking across the island of Ireland, including exploratory drilling’.
“The DUP Minister of Economy, Gordon Lyons, is reviewing petroleum licensing policy and intends to introduce petroleum licensing policy options into the Northern Ireland Executive before Christmas.
“Sinn Féin have four seats in the Executive, the DUP have five seats, but Sinn Féin can work with the commitments from Alliance and UUP to ensure the new policy is to ban petroleum licensing in Northern Ireland.
“We call on Sinn Féin to act now in the Northern Ireland Executive to ensure a full and final ban on petroleum licensing by voting for a ban on petroleum licensing to be the new Northern Ireland policy.
“This will fulfil Sinn Féin’s promise, before it is too late.”
While Sinn Féin last week put forward a Bill which would outlaw the exploration and extraction of petroleum by fracking, it has been criticised by campaign groups.
Oscar Mooney, of Extinction Rebellion Ireland, said: “Fracking is a dangerous practice that destroys environments, communities, and is a violation of human rights.
“In Sinn Féin’s election manifesto they stated they would secure ‘a total ban on fracking across the island of Ireland, including exploratory drilling’.
“The DUP Minister of Economy, Gordon Lyons, is reviewing petroleum licensing policy and intends to introduce petroleum licensing policy options into the Northern Ireland Executive before Christmas.
“Sinn Féin have four seats in the Executive, the DUP have five seats, but Sinn Féin can work with the commitments from Alliance and UUP to ensure the new policy is to ban petroleum licensing in Northern Ireland.
“We call on Sinn Féin to act now in the Northern Ireland Executive to ensure a full and final ban on petroleum licensing by voting for a ban on petroleum licensing to be the new Northern Ireland policy.
“This will fulfil Sinn Féin’s promise, before it is too late.”
Extinction Rebellion Ireland is calling on Sinn Féin to act now in the Northern Irish Executive to ensure a full and final ban on petroleum licensing
(Brian Lawless/PA)
The group said that, while there is currently no fracking on the island of Ireland, if a petroleum licensing policy is passed then two current applications will be granted.
This will allow drilling and fracking at two locations in Northern Ireland – in Fermanagh and at Lough Neagh.
Mr Mooney added: “The expansion of the fossil fuel industry, just after Cop26 in Glasgow, is not just disappointing but wholly irresponsible.
“We know that we need to stop relying on fossil fuels and rapidly switch to renewables immediately if we want to stay under 1.5 degrees and avoid the worst effects of climate change.”
The group said that, while there is currently no fracking on the island of Ireland, if a petroleum licensing policy is passed then two current applications will be granted.
This will allow drilling and fracking at two locations in Northern Ireland – in Fermanagh and at Lough Neagh.
Mr Mooney added: “The expansion of the fossil fuel industry, just after Cop26 in Glasgow, is not just disappointing but wholly irresponsible.
“We know that we need to stop relying on fossil fuels and rapidly switch to renewables immediately if we want to stay under 1.5 degrees and avoid the worst effects of climate change.”
Virginia board denies permit to extend fracking pipeline into North Carolina
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 12/03/21
Virginia’s air pollution governing body on Friday voted against approving an air quality permit for a proposed compressor station in the southern Virginia town of Chatham.
On the second day of a two-day meeting, the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board voted 6-1 against the proposal. The proposal would have extended the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which carries fracked fuel, over the border into North Carolina.
Environmental groups and local advocates have vocally opposed the project, citing environmental reviews indicating it would increase the levels of air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde.
Sixteen members of Virginia’s House of Delegates had previously urged the board to deny the permit in October, citing environmental justice concerns.
“Emissions from compressor stations contain toxic materials and any proposed project that would introduce new health hazards into a community should be very carefully considered,” they wrote. “A project’s potential impacts and contribution to cumulative impacts must be weighed against any arguments as to its necessity.”
Environmental advocates praised the board’s decision, including Lynn Godfrey, community outreach coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter.
“No one should be asked to sacrifice their air, water, and health so that fossil fuel executives can make a quick buck in a world transitioning to clean energy. This is a win for Virginia communities who already live with elevated levels of fossil fuel pollution, and everyone everywhere who wants a livable future for their children,” Godfrey said in a statement. “The writing is on the wall if the wealthy investors backing this project are willing to read it: the age of fossil fuels is over, it’s time to drop this polluting pipeline.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan has repeatedly emphasized a focus on environmental justice, or addressing the impacts of environmental policy on disadvantaged communities. In October, the agency began the process to increase reporting requirements for another compound, ethylene oxide, that has been linked to respiratory issues and cancer in local communities.
BY ZACK BUDRYK - 12/03/21
Virginia’s air pollution governing body on Friday voted against approving an air quality permit for a proposed compressor station in the southern Virginia town of Chatham.
On the second day of a two-day meeting, the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board voted 6-1 against the proposal. The proposal would have extended the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which carries fracked fuel, over the border into North Carolina.
Environmental groups and local advocates have vocally opposed the project, citing environmental reviews indicating it would increase the levels of air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde.
Sixteen members of Virginia’s House of Delegates had previously urged the board to deny the permit in October, citing environmental justice concerns.
“Emissions from compressor stations contain toxic materials and any proposed project that would introduce new health hazards into a community should be very carefully considered,” they wrote. “A project’s potential impacts and contribution to cumulative impacts must be weighed against any arguments as to its necessity.”
Environmental advocates praised the board’s decision, including Lynn Godfrey, community outreach coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Virginia chapter.
“No one should be asked to sacrifice their air, water, and health so that fossil fuel executives can make a quick buck in a world transitioning to clean energy. This is a win for Virginia communities who already live with elevated levels of fossil fuel pollution, and everyone everywhere who wants a livable future for their children,” Godfrey said in a statement. “The writing is on the wall if the wealthy investors backing this project are willing to read it: the age of fossil fuels is over, it’s time to drop this polluting pipeline.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan has repeatedly emphasized a focus on environmental justice, or addressing the impacts of environmental policy on disadvantaged communities. In October, the agency began the process to increase reporting requirements for another compound, ethylene oxide, that has been linked to respiratory issues and cancer in local communities.
Texas families fight fracking near day care center, homes amid health worries from natural gas drilling
Living close to drilling sites has been linked to health risks, especially to kids. Many of the wells Total Energy has drilled in Arlington are near Latino and Black or low-income communities.
By Cathy Bussewitz | AP and Martha Irvine:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23053269/merlin_102575815.jpg)
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Living close to drilling sites has been linked to health risks, especially to kids. Many of the wells Total Energy has drilled in Arlington are near Latino and Black or low-income communities.
By Cathy Bussewitz | AP and Martha Irvine
| AP Nov 30, 2021
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Rosalia Tejeda, second from left, plays with her children, from left, son Juscianni Blackeller, 13; Adaliana Gray, 5, and Audrey Gray, 2, in their backyard in Arlington, Texas, Monday, Oct. 25, 2021. As Tejeda, 38, has learned more about health risks posed by fracking for natural gas, she has become a vocal opponent of a plan to add more natural gas wells at a site near her home.
(AP Photo/Martha Irvine) ORG XMIT: RPMI201 Martha Irvine / AP
ARLINGTON, Texas — At a playground outside a North Texas day care center, giggling preschoolers chase each other into a playhouse. Toddlers scoot by on tricycles. A boy cries as a teacher helps him negotiate over a toy.
Uphill from the playground, peeking between trees, Total Energies is pumping for natural gas.
The French energy giant wants to drill three new wells on the property next to Mother’s Heart Learning Center, which serves mainly Black and Latino children. The three wells and two existing ones would lie about 600 feet from where the children planted a garden of sunflowers.
For families of the children and for others nearby, it’s a prospect fraught with fear and anxiety.
Living near drilling sites has been linked to health risks, especially to children, ranging from asthma to neurological and developmental disorders.
While some states are requiring energy companies to drill farther from day care centers, schools and homes, Texas has made it exceedingly difficult for local governments to fight back.
The affected areas also include communities near related infrastructure — compressor stations, for example, which push gas through pipelines and emit toxic fumes, and export facilities, where gas is cooled before being shipped overseas.:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23053041/merlin_102575837.jpg)
ARLINGTON, Texas — At a playground outside a North Texas day care center, giggling preschoolers chase each other into a playhouse. Toddlers scoot by on tricycles. A boy cries as a teacher helps him negotiate over a toy.
Uphill from the playground, peeking between trees, Total Energies is pumping for natural gas.
The French energy giant wants to drill three new wells on the property next to Mother’s Heart Learning Center, which serves mainly Black and Latino children. The three wells and two existing ones would lie about 600 feet from where the children planted a garden of sunflowers.
For families of the children and for others nearby, it’s a prospect fraught with fear and anxiety.
Living near drilling sites has been linked to health risks, especially to children, ranging from asthma to neurological and developmental disorders.
While some states are requiring energy companies to drill farther from day care centers, schools and homes, Texas has made it exceedingly difficult for local governments to fight back.
The affected areas also include communities near related infrastructure — compressor stations, for example, which push gas through pipelines and emit toxic fumes, and export facilities, where gas is cooled before being shipped overseas.
Wanda Vincent prepares to check the temperature of 2-year-old Olivia Grace Charles, who holds the hand of her mother Guerda Philemond outside the Mother’s Heart Learning Center in Arlington, Texas. Philemond is worried about a proposal to add three new gas wells at a drill site that’s a few hundred feet from the day care center and several homes.
Martha Irvine / AP
“I’m trying to protect my little one,” said Guerda Philemond, whose 2-year-old Olivia Grace Charles attends the day care center in Arlington. “There’s a lot of land, empty space they can drill. It doesn’t have to be in the back yard of a day care.”
Total declined an interview request. In a written statement, the company said it has operated near Mother’s Heart for more than a decade without any safety concerns expressed by the city of Arlington.
“We listen to and do understand the concerns of the local communities with whom we interact frequently to ensure we operate in harmony with them and the local authorities,” the statement said.
The clash in Arlington comes against the backdrop of pledges from world leaders to reduce emissions, burn less fossil fuel and transition to cleaner energy. Yet the world’s reliance on natural gas is growing. As soon as next year, the United States is set to become the world’s largest exporter of liquid natural gas, or LNG, according to Rystad Energy.
As a result, despite pressure for energy companies to shift their spending to cleaner technologies, there likely will be more drilling for natural gas in Arlington and other communities.
And children who spend time near drilling sites or natural gas distribution centers — in neighborhoods critics call “sacrifice zones” — could face a risk of developing neurological or learning problems and exposure to carcinogens. A report by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which reviewed dozens of scientific studies, found the public health risks associated with these sites include cancers, asthma, respiratory diseases, rashes, heart problems and mental health disorders.
Many of the wells Total has drilled in Arlington are near Latino and Black or low-income communities, often just a few hundred feet from homes. An analysis by The Associated Press of the locations of wells Total operates in Arlington shows their density is higher in neighborhoods that many people of color call home.
“America is segregated, and so is pollution,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “The dirty industries and what planners call locally unwanted land uses oftentimes followed the path of least resistance. Historically, that’s been poor communities and communities of color.”
When gas pumped in Texas is shipped out for export, it goes to liquid natural gas facilities along the Gulf Coast. Many of those facilities are near communities, that are predominantly non-white, such as in Port Arthur, Texas.
“There’s constant talk of expansions here,” said John Beard, founder of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, which opposes the expansion of export facilities. “When you keep adding this to the air, the air quality degrades, and so does our quality of life ,and so does our health.”
“I’m trying to protect my little one,” said Guerda Philemond, whose 2-year-old Olivia Grace Charles attends the day care center in Arlington. “There’s a lot of land, empty space they can drill. It doesn’t have to be in the back yard of a day care.”
Total declined an interview request. In a written statement, the company said it has operated near Mother’s Heart for more than a decade without any safety concerns expressed by the city of Arlington.
“We listen to and do understand the concerns of the local communities with whom we interact frequently to ensure we operate in harmony with them and the local authorities,” the statement said.
The clash in Arlington comes against the backdrop of pledges from world leaders to reduce emissions, burn less fossil fuel and transition to cleaner energy. Yet the world’s reliance on natural gas is growing. As soon as next year, the United States is set to become the world’s largest exporter of liquid natural gas, or LNG, according to Rystad Energy.
As a result, despite pressure for energy companies to shift their spending to cleaner technologies, there likely will be more drilling for natural gas in Arlington and other communities.
And children who spend time near drilling sites or natural gas distribution centers — in neighborhoods critics call “sacrifice zones” — could face a risk of developing neurological or learning problems and exposure to carcinogens. A report by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York, which reviewed dozens of scientific studies, found the public health risks associated with these sites include cancers, asthma, respiratory diseases, rashes, heart problems and mental health disorders.
Many of the wells Total has drilled in Arlington are near Latino and Black or low-income communities, often just a few hundred feet from homes. An analysis by The Associated Press of the locations of wells Total operates in Arlington shows their density is higher in neighborhoods that many people of color call home.
“America is segregated, and so is pollution,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “The dirty industries and what planners call locally unwanted land uses oftentimes followed the path of least resistance. Historically, that’s been poor communities and communities of color.”
When gas pumped in Texas is shipped out for export, it goes to liquid natural gas facilities along the Gulf Coast. Many of those facilities are near communities, that are predominantly non-white, such as in Port Arthur, Texas.
“There’s constant talk of expansions here,” said John Beard, founder of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, which opposes the expansion of export facilities. “When you keep adding this to the air, the air quality degrades, and so does our quality of life ,and so does our health.”
Wanda Vincent, who owns Mother’s Heart Learning Center in Arlington, Texas, is upset about a proposal to add natural gas wells at a nearby fracking site that’s operated by TEP Barnett.
Martha Irvine / AP
At the Arlington day care center, owner Wanda Vincent has been cautioning parents about the health risks and gathering signatures to petition the city to reject Total’s drilling request.
When she opened the center nearly two decades ago, Vincent said, she wanted to provide a refuge for children in her care, some of whom suffer from hunger and poverty.
That was before natural gas production accelerated in the United States. Around 2005, energy companies discovered how to drill horizontally into shale formations using hydraulic fracturing techniques — a technique known as fracking.
Water and chemicals are shot deep underground into a well bore that travels horizontally. It is highly effective. But fracking is known to contribute to air and water pollution and to raise risks to people and the environment.
Some states have acted to force fracking away from where people live and go to school. Vermont and New York state banned fracking years ago. Last year, Colorado required new wells to be drilled at least 2,000 feet from homes and schools. California has proposed a limit of 3,200 feet. Los Angeles has taken steps to ban urban drilling.
In Arlington, drilling is supposed to be done no closer than 600 feet from day care centers or homes. But companies can apply for a waiver to drill as close as 300 feet.
France, Total’s home country, bars fracking. But that ban is largely symbolic because no meaningful oil or gas supplies exist in France. Total, one of the world’s largest natural gas companies, drills in 27 other countries. It turns much of that gas into liquid, then ships it, trades it and re-gasifies it at LNG terminals worldwide.
The gas wells next to Mother’s Heart represent a tiny fraction of Total’s global operations. Yet the company holds tight to its plans to drill there despite the community’s resistance.
“Nobody should have a production ban unless they have a consumption ban because it has made places like Arlington extraction colonies for countries like France, and they have shifted the environmental toll, the human toll, to us,” said Ranjana Bhandari, director of Liveable Arlington, a group leading the opposition to Total’s drilling plans.
In Arlington, companies that are rejected for a drilling permit can reapply after a year. Some Arlington city council members, who declined interview requests, previously have said they fear litigation if they don’t allow the drilling. That’s because a Texas law bars local governments from banning, limiting or even regulating oil or gas operations except in limited circumstances.
“If I’m able to reach out to the French and speak to them directly, I would let them know, ‘Would you be able to allow somebody to go in your back yard and do natural gas drilling where you know your wife lays her head or your kids lay their head?’ ” said Philemond, the day care center parent. “And the answer would absolutely be ‘No’ within a second.”
At the Arlington day care center, owner Wanda Vincent has been cautioning parents about the health risks and gathering signatures to petition the city to reject Total’s drilling request.
When she opened the center nearly two decades ago, Vincent said, she wanted to provide a refuge for children in her care, some of whom suffer from hunger and poverty.
That was before natural gas production accelerated in the United States. Around 2005, energy companies discovered how to drill horizontally into shale formations using hydraulic fracturing techniques — a technique known as fracking.
Water and chemicals are shot deep underground into a well bore that travels horizontally. It is highly effective. But fracking is known to contribute to air and water pollution and to raise risks to people and the environment.
Some states have acted to force fracking away from where people live and go to school. Vermont and New York state banned fracking years ago. Last year, Colorado required new wells to be drilled at least 2,000 feet from homes and schools. California has proposed a limit of 3,200 feet. Los Angeles has taken steps to ban urban drilling.
In Arlington, drilling is supposed to be done no closer than 600 feet from day care centers or homes. But companies can apply for a waiver to drill as close as 300 feet.
France, Total’s home country, bars fracking. But that ban is largely symbolic because no meaningful oil or gas supplies exist in France. Total, one of the world’s largest natural gas companies, drills in 27 other countries. It turns much of that gas into liquid, then ships it, trades it and re-gasifies it at LNG terminals worldwide.
The gas wells next to Mother’s Heart represent a tiny fraction of Total’s global operations. Yet the company holds tight to its plans to drill there despite the community’s resistance.
“Nobody should have a production ban unless they have a consumption ban because it has made places like Arlington extraction colonies for countries like France, and they have shifted the environmental toll, the human toll, to us,” said Ranjana Bhandari, director of Liveable Arlington, a group leading the opposition to Total’s drilling plans.
In Arlington, companies that are rejected for a drilling permit can reapply after a year. Some Arlington city council members, who declined interview requests, previously have said they fear litigation if they don’t allow the drilling. That’s because a Texas law bars local governments from banning, limiting or even regulating oil or gas operations except in limited circumstances.
“If I’m able to reach out to the French and speak to them directly, I would let them know, ‘Would you be able to allow somebody to go in your back yard and do natural gas drilling where you know your wife lays her head or your kids lay their head?’ ” said Philemond, the day care center parent. “And the answer would absolutely be ‘No’ within a second.”
Frank and Michelle Meeks in their backyard in Arlington, Texas, with a fracking site, hidden by “sound walls,” looms behind them.
Martha Irvine / AP
A mile or so from the day care, in the back yard of Frank and Michelle Meeks, a high-pitched ringing blares like a school fire alarm as the sun sets. Just beyond their patio and grill looms the wall of a Total site where one of the wells was in the “flowback” stage. This site also sits behind other houses and near two day care centers.
When the wells were first drilled, Michelle Meeks said, the sound and vibrations were a full-body experience. At this point, she and her husband barely notice it.
After the drilling started a decade ago at the site a few hundred feet behind their house, they noticed cracks in their foundation and their patio. They now receive royalty checks for $15 or $20 a few times a year. That wouldn’t make a dent in the cost of repairing the cracks in their foundation. But when the oil and gas developers came knocking years ago, the couple thought saying no would have been futile.
“In Texas, you really can’t fight oil and gas production,” said Frank Meeks, 60, a machine operator. “We don’t have the money to go and get big-time lawyers to keep them out of our back yards.”
Arlington’s air quality exceeds federal ozone pollution standards. In 2012, at the height of the fracking boom, asthma rates for school children in Tarrant County were 19% to 25% — far above national and state norms.
As the fracking boom took off, “land men” from the oil and gas companies went door to door in Arlington, asking permission to drill beneath homes of those who owned mineral rights. Some homeowners were offered signing bonuses and royalties. Renters — who don’t own the rights to the minerals beneath their homes — had no choice but to yield to drilling and received nothing for it.
Arlington sits atop the Barnett Shale, one of the largest on-land natural gas fields in the United States. Gas production, which peaked in the Barnett Shale a decade ago, has been declining. Even with natural gas prices rising, few large U.S. companies plan to drill new wells at a time when investors are seeking environmentally responsible companies.
“Total is a publicly traded company. They claim to be very interested in the energy transition and so forth,” said Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University. “If a U.S. company were to do that here that was publicly traded, their stock would be hammered.”
A mile or so from the day care, in the back yard of Frank and Michelle Meeks, a high-pitched ringing blares like a school fire alarm as the sun sets. Just beyond their patio and grill looms the wall of a Total site where one of the wells was in the “flowback” stage. This site also sits behind other houses and near two day care centers.
When the wells were first drilled, Michelle Meeks said, the sound and vibrations were a full-body experience. At this point, she and her husband barely notice it.
After the drilling started a decade ago at the site a few hundred feet behind their house, they noticed cracks in their foundation and their patio. They now receive royalty checks for $15 or $20 a few times a year. That wouldn’t make a dent in the cost of repairing the cracks in their foundation. But when the oil and gas developers came knocking years ago, the couple thought saying no would have been futile.
“In Texas, you really can’t fight oil and gas production,” said Frank Meeks, 60, a machine operator. “We don’t have the money to go and get big-time lawyers to keep them out of our back yards.”
Arlington’s air quality exceeds federal ozone pollution standards. In 2012, at the height of the fracking boom, asthma rates for school children in Tarrant County were 19% to 25% — far above national and state norms.
As the fracking boom took off, “land men” from the oil and gas companies went door to door in Arlington, asking permission to drill beneath homes of those who owned mineral rights. Some homeowners were offered signing bonuses and royalties. Renters — who don’t own the rights to the minerals beneath their homes — had no choice but to yield to drilling and received nothing for it.
Arlington sits atop the Barnett Shale, one of the largest on-land natural gas fields in the United States. Gas production, which peaked in the Barnett Shale a decade ago, has been declining. Even with natural gas prices rising, few large U.S. companies plan to drill new wells at a time when investors are seeking environmentally responsible companies.
“Total is a publicly traded company. They claim to be very interested in the energy transition and so forth,” said Bruce Bullock, director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University. “If a U.S. company were to do that here that was publicly traded, their stock would be hammered.”
CALIFORNIA
Not just fracking: State slows almost all oil permitting
By JOHN COX jcox@bakersfield.com
Erik Bartsch, president and CEO of Bakersfield-based oil producer Aera Energy LLC, addressed the 15th annual Kern County Energy Summit Nov. 10 at the Bakersfield Marriott at the Convention Center.
John Cox / The Californian
Gov. Gavin Newsom, left, is briefed by Billy Lacobie, of Chevron, center, and Jason Marshall, of the then-California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, on July 24, 2019, while touring the Chevron oil field west of Bakersfield, where a spill of about 900,000 gallons flowed into a dry creek bed. Newsom said the state needs to be more aggressive on regulating oil drilling in the state to avoid other major spills.
Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / file
Behind California's de-facto fracking moratorium is a broader trend of growing concern to Kern's oil industry: fewer permits for every other type of well work except plugging and abandonments.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has resisted environmentalists' calls to halt all new drilling. But at the same time, his administration has introduced new levels of scrutiny among other changes that have restricted permitting at a time high oil prices have forced the Biden administration to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
State and federal data show that in the two years after Newsom took office in January 2019, California saw a 19 percent drop to 1,796 in permits given annually for new drilling. Permits awarded each year for plugging and abandonment of wells actually jumped 11 percent to 3,001 during that period, while the number awarded for work on existing wells fell 37 percent to hit 1,550.
POLITICAL FOOTBALL
California oil permitting has followed politics since before Newsom became governor. Former Gov. Jerry Brown fired former State Oil and Gas Supervisor Elena Miller in 2011 after a fervent campaign by local executives and pressure by politicians including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.
The main complaint against Miller then was the same as it is now against state regulators: Greater scrutiny and a lack of urgency on the state's part mean it takes longer for oil producers to get a permit that can sustain local jobs and support local tax revenues.
The head of Bakersfield-based oil producer Aera Energy LLC spotlighted the issue Nov. 10 during his keynote speech at this month's Kern County Energy Summit.
QUIET SLOWDOWN
President and CEO Erik Bartsch clicked to show a slide titled "California Permitting Slowdown." It charted big jumps in the number of days the state has taken in recent years to approve underground injection permits and well stimulation projects like fracking, the controversial well-finishing technique also known as hydraulic fracturing.
His point was that Newsom is quietly attacking California's oil supply.
"The phase-out is happening today with no public debate," said the head of Aera, whose state permit denials for frack jobs in western Kern are the subject of a lawsuit pending in Kern County Superior Court.
STATE RESPONSE
The state's primary oil regulator, when presented with industry summaries showing the permitting declines, pointed to the Newsom administration's reprioritization of public health and safety in oil field project reviews, and what it called the most rigorous oversight process in the country.
The California Geologic Energy Management Division pointed to several initiatives ensuring more thorough reviews of oil field operators' permit requests, as well as an in-depth review of the state's permitting process. It acknowledged that additional work has taken time.
It noted a recent audit of the state's permitting review process, CalGEM's introduction of federal scientific reviews of fracking project applications and new regulations on injection work. It also called attention to a moratorium the Newsom administration imposed on certain high-pressure steam injection jobs after a large oil leak near McKittrick.
COURT TWIST
A twist recently arose when a judge ruled against Kern's attempts to institute an over-the-counter permitting process for oil and gas operations. The ruling has, at least temporarily, returned CalGEM to being the lead agency in California environmental reviews of oil field projects.
The agency said in an email its staff will "rigorously review every permit request in accordance with the California Environmental Quality Act."
"This action allows operators to move forward with more than 200 upcoming plugging operations to permanently seal old wells which are no longer in use," CalGEM stated.
INDUSTRY VIEW
The CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association trade group, Rock Zierman, said the state is fully empowered by the court to permit wells that have already gone through the county process prior to Oct. 6. But he said the agency insists on giving only conditional approval to new wells until the county's permitting case is resolved.
A spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association trade group said the Newsom administration is making it difficult for oil producers to get the permits they need to produce affordable, reliable energy for the state. He questioned why it's happening at a time President Joe Biden is calling on Russia and OPEC to increase oil production to help lower global fuel prices.
Santa Clarita-based California Resources Corp., responding to questions about the pace of state oil permitting, voiced no complaints as it pursues conventional projects, not involving well stimulation, and "works constructively with state agencies to secure the permitting required to safely produce stable, affordable low-carbon fuel for Californians."
CHEVRON'S COMMENTS
Chevron Corp., when asked the same questions, noted California produces just 30 percent of the oil it consumes and that, as an energy island, in-state production contributes to energy reliability and security.
The company said policies that restrict supply only shift energy production, along with high-paying jobs and tax revenue, to places with lower regulatory standards. It said it supports predictable, consistent permitting that promotes safe, responsible developing of oil and gas resources.
"We need permitting predictability and consistency to build and execute our business plans," a Chevron spokesman wrote in an email.
The sun sets over an oil field near the Kern County community of McKittrick. California regulators this year began denying fracking permits on the grounds of climate change.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
Not just fracking: State slows almost all oil permitting
By JOHN COX jcox@bakersfield.com
Erik Bartsch, president and CEO of Bakersfield-based oil producer Aera Energy LLC, addressed the 15th annual Kern County Energy Summit Nov. 10 at the Bakersfield Marriott at the Convention Center.
John Cox / The Californian
Gov. Gavin Newsom, left, is briefed by Billy Lacobie, of Chevron, center, and Jason Marshall, of the then-California Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, on July 24, 2019, while touring the Chevron oil field west of Bakersfield, where a spill of about 900,000 gallons flowed into a dry creek bed. Newsom said the state needs to be more aggressive on regulating oil drilling in the state to avoid other major spills.
Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / file
Behind California's de-facto fracking moratorium is a broader trend of growing concern to Kern's oil industry: fewer permits for every other type of well work except plugging and abandonments.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has resisted environmentalists' calls to halt all new drilling. But at the same time, his administration has introduced new levels of scrutiny among other changes that have restricted permitting at a time high oil prices have forced the Biden administration to open the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
State and federal data show that in the two years after Newsom took office in January 2019, California saw a 19 percent drop to 1,796 in permits given annually for new drilling. Permits awarded each year for plugging and abandonment of wells actually jumped 11 percent to 3,001 during that period, while the number awarded for work on existing wells fell 37 percent to hit 1,550.
POLITICAL FOOTBALL
California oil permitting has followed politics since before Newsom became governor. Former Gov. Jerry Brown fired former State Oil and Gas Supervisor Elena Miller in 2011 after a fervent campaign by local executives and pressure by politicians including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield.
The main complaint against Miller then was the same as it is now against state regulators: Greater scrutiny and a lack of urgency on the state's part mean it takes longer for oil producers to get a permit that can sustain local jobs and support local tax revenues.
The head of Bakersfield-based oil producer Aera Energy LLC spotlighted the issue Nov. 10 during his keynote speech at this month's Kern County Energy Summit.
QUIET SLOWDOWN
President and CEO Erik Bartsch clicked to show a slide titled "California Permitting Slowdown." It charted big jumps in the number of days the state has taken in recent years to approve underground injection permits and well stimulation projects like fracking, the controversial well-finishing technique also known as hydraulic fracturing.
His point was that Newsom is quietly attacking California's oil supply.
"The phase-out is happening today with no public debate," said the head of Aera, whose state permit denials for frack jobs in western Kern are the subject of a lawsuit pending in Kern County Superior Court.
STATE RESPONSE
The state's primary oil regulator, when presented with industry summaries showing the permitting declines, pointed to the Newsom administration's reprioritization of public health and safety in oil field project reviews, and what it called the most rigorous oversight process in the country.
The California Geologic Energy Management Division pointed to several initiatives ensuring more thorough reviews of oil field operators' permit requests, as well as an in-depth review of the state's permitting process. It acknowledged that additional work has taken time.
It noted a recent audit of the state's permitting review process, CalGEM's introduction of federal scientific reviews of fracking project applications and new regulations on injection work. It also called attention to a moratorium the Newsom administration imposed on certain high-pressure steam injection jobs after a large oil leak near McKittrick.
COURT TWIST
A twist recently arose when a judge ruled against Kern's attempts to institute an over-the-counter permitting process for oil and gas operations. The ruling has, at least temporarily, returned CalGEM to being the lead agency in California environmental reviews of oil field projects.
The agency said in an email its staff will "rigorously review every permit request in accordance with the California Environmental Quality Act."
"This action allows operators to move forward with more than 200 upcoming plugging operations to permanently seal old wells which are no longer in use," CalGEM stated.
INDUSTRY VIEW
The CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association trade group, Rock Zierman, said the state is fully empowered by the court to permit wells that have already gone through the county process prior to Oct. 6. But he said the agency insists on giving only conditional approval to new wells until the county's permitting case is resolved.
A spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association trade group said the Newsom administration is making it difficult for oil producers to get the permits they need to produce affordable, reliable energy for the state. He questioned why it's happening at a time President Joe Biden is calling on Russia and OPEC to increase oil production to help lower global fuel prices.
Santa Clarita-based California Resources Corp., responding to questions about the pace of state oil permitting, voiced no complaints as it pursues conventional projects, not involving well stimulation, and "works constructively with state agencies to secure the permitting required to safely produce stable, affordable low-carbon fuel for Californians."
CHEVRON'S COMMENTS
Chevron Corp., when asked the same questions, noted California produces just 30 percent of the oil it consumes and that, as an energy island, in-state production contributes to energy reliability and security.
The company said policies that restrict supply only shift energy production, along with high-paying jobs and tax revenue, to places with lower regulatory standards. It said it supports predictable, consistent permitting that promotes safe, responsible developing of oil and gas resources.
"We need permitting predictability and consistency to build and execute our business plans," a Chevron spokesman wrote in an email.
Did California issue its last fracking permit? Let’s hope so
The sun sets over an oil field near the Kern County community of McKittrick. California regulators this year began denying fracking permits on the grounds of climate change.
(Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)
DEC. 17, 2021
There’s been a welcome development in California’s fight against climate change: Regulators are saying no to the oil industry.
Earlier this year, state oil and gas regulators quietly began denying hydraulic fracturing permits on climate change grounds, without waiting to finish regulations to ban fracking by 2024 that Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered. Since July, the state Geologic Energy Management Division has denied 109 permits sought by oil companies to use hydraulic fracturing or other well stimulation methods, and in 50 of those cases has cited the impacts on the climate and public health.
California has not granted a fracking permit since February. So if the streak of denials continues, it’s possible that will be the last one ever issued.
Let’s hope so. California needs this kind of decisive action, and more of it, to help slow the heating of the planet and do right by the communities near drilling operations, which are disproportionately Black and Latino, and have suffered the health impacts for far too long.
Dec. 12, 2021
In one letter to Aera Energy, State Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk put the permit denials in the context of deadly heat waves, devastating wildfires, intensifying drought and the need to rapidly decrease fossil fuel extraction to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“Given the increasingly urgent climate effects of fossil-fuel production, the continuing impacts of climate change and hydraulic fracturing on public health and natural resources,” Ntuk wrote, he “could not in good conscience” grant the company the permits it sought.
A California law that took effect in 2014 requires additional review and permitting for hydraulic fracturing, which involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals underground at high pressure. But the state had never actually denied a fracking permit until last year.
The denials have prompted lawsuits, including one filed in Kern County Superior Court by the Western States Petroleum Assn., which calls it a “de facto moratorium” on well stimulation permits and says the applications were improperly denied. But as regulators point out, state law gives them discretion over fracking permits and they are not obligated to approve them.
What oil interests really fear is the end of oil and gas production and the elimination of their industry in the state.
OPINION
Editorial: Why a fossilized gas station is the perfect symbol for California’s climate fight
Nov. 23, 2021
But the science is clear: To avert catastrophic climate change we must phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and shift rapidly to emissions-free energy sources. These permit denials affect a small amount of California’s overall oil production, only 2% of which involved hydraulic fracturing in 2020, and the extraction method is almost exclusively limited to Kern County, according to state officials. Nonetheless, it’s encouraging to see the Newsom administration use permitting as a tool to keep more oil in the ground.
So what’s stopping his administration from going further and turning down more oil industry permits because of the threats to the climate and our health? The state has issued 517 new oil and gas drilling permits since February, projects that will also increase pollution and heat the planet.
Officials argue that broadly rejecting drilling permits and stopping so much production at once would be too big of a jolt to the state’s still overwhelmingly fossil-fueled economy. Though Newsom’s administration is evaluating how to end oil extraction by 2045, in-state production still accounts for about one-third of California’s oil supply. So for now, regulators are targeting fracking, which is one of the most intense types of extraction, and drilling operations close to homes and schools.
Newsom has had a somewhat confusing evolution on the issue. In 2019 he fired the state’s top oil industry regulator for issuing too many fracking permits, then his administration stopped granting them while conducting scientific reviews, only to start again. Last year Newsom asked state legislators to send him a bill to ban fracking, insisting that he lacked the executive authority. But after legislative efforts failed, he announced in April that his administration would move forward with regulations to ban fracking by 2024. His administration is also now developing rules to prohibit new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools and healthcare facilities, measures that are also moving forward administratively after legislation died amid opposition from the oil industry and its allies in organized labor.
Newsom is right to forge ahead when state lawmakers will not act to protect public health and the planet. California is still not doing nearly enough, but at least the governor seems to be waking up to the idea that even relatively small actions, like saying no to oil companies, cannot wait.
There’s been a welcome development in California’s fight against climate change: Regulators are saying no to the oil industry.
Earlier this year, state oil and gas regulators quietly began denying hydraulic fracturing permits on climate change grounds, without waiting to finish regulations to ban fracking by 2024 that Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered. Since July, the state Geologic Energy Management Division has denied 109 permits sought by oil companies to use hydraulic fracturing or other well stimulation methods, and in 50 of those cases has cited the impacts on the climate and public health.
California has not granted a fracking permit since February. So if the streak of denials continues, it’s possible that will be the last one ever issued.
Let’s hope so. California needs this kind of decisive action, and more of it, to help slow the heating of the planet and do right by the communities near drilling operations, which are disproportionately Black and Latino, and have suffered the health impacts for far too long.
Dec. 12, 2021
In one letter to Aera Energy, State Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk put the permit denials in the context of deadly heat waves, devastating wildfires, intensifying drought and the need to rapidly decrease fossil fuel extraction to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“Given the increasingly urgent climate effects of fossil-fuel production, the continuing impacts of climate change and hydraulic fracturing on public health and natural resources,” Ntuk wrote, he “could not in good conscience” grant the company the permits it sought.
A California law that took effect in 2014 requires additional review and permitting for hydraulic fracturing, which involves injecting a mixture of water, sand and chemicals underground at high pressure. But the state had never actually denied a fracking permit until last year.
The denials have prompted lawsuits, including one filed in Kern County Superior Court by the Western States Petroleum Assn., which calls it a “de facto moratorium” on well stimulation permits and says the applications were improperly denied. But as regulators point out, state law gives them discretion over fracking permits and they are not obligated to approve them.
What oil interests really fear is the end of oil and gas production and the elimination of their industry in the state.
OPINION
Editorial: Why a fossilized gas station is the perfect symbol for California’s climate fight
Nov. 23, 2021
But the science is clear: To avert catastrophic climate change we must phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and shift rapidly to emissions-free energy sources. These permit denials affect a small amount of California’s overall oil production, only 2% of which involved hydraulic fracturing in 2020, and the extraction method is almost exclusively limited to Kern County, according to state officials. Nonetheless, it’s encouraging to see the Newsom administration use permitting as a tool to keep more oil in the ground.
So what’s stopping his administration from going further and turning down more oil industry permits because of the threats to the climate and our health? The state has issued 517 new oil and gas drilling permits since February, projects that will also increase pollution and heat the planet.
Officials argue that broadly rejecting drilling permits and stopping so much production at once would be too big of a jolt to the state’s still overwhelmingly fossil-fueled economy. Though Newsom’s administration is evaluating how to end oil extraction by 2045, in-state production still accounts for about one-third of California’s oil supply. So for now, regulators are targeting fracking, which is one of the most intense types of extraction, and drilling operations close to homes and schools.
Newsom has had a somewhat confusing evolution on the issue. In 2019 he fired the state’s top oil industry regulator for issuing too many fracking permits, then his administration stopped granting them while conducting scientific reviews, only to start again. Last year Newsom asked state legislators to send him a bill to ban fracking, insisting that he lacked the executive authority. But after legislative efforts failed, he announced in April that his administration would move forward with regulations to ban fracking by 2024. His administration is also now developing rules to prohibit new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools and healthcare facilities, measures that are also moving forward administratively after legislation died amid opposition from the oil industry and its allies in organized labor.
Newsom is right to forge ahead when state lawmakers will not act to protect public health and the planet. California is still not doing nearly enough, but at least the governor seems to be waking up to the idea that even relatively small actions, like saying no to oil companies, cannot wait.
UK
Economists to vote on strike action after below-inflation pay offerNIESR’s management offered an increase worth 2% while latest data shows cost of living is up 5.1%
The institute is among the country’s pre-eminent forecasters of inflation, and it forecast average pay growth across the economy next year of 4.5%.
Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Richard Partington
Richard Partington
Economics correspondent
THE GUARDIAN
Wed 15 Dec 2021
Asking workers to stomach a below-inflation pay rise is never popular. Asking them to do so when their day job is forecasting the cost of living is really asking for trouble.
And so it has proved at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. A strike ballot opened on Wednesday for members of the Unite union after the NIESR’s management offered a basic pay deal worth 2%. It comes after wages were frozen last year.
With the latest official data showing the cost of living was up by 5.1% in year to November, the union is confident its members will vote to shut down their computers and stop working on their spreadsheets.
Staff at the institute, founded in 1938 by a group of leading social and economic reformers including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, are among the country’s pre-eminent forecasters of inflation, and have forecast average pay growth across the economy next year of 4.5%.
Now 21 Unite members, representing about half the total workforce, where average pay for economists and social researchers is between £22,000 and £41,000, predict a high probability of strike action outside the institute’s bookish Westminster offices.
The ballot will close on 7 January. Any action to down tools could affect research contracts which the NIESR has with other organisations, and its forecasts for the UK and global economies, which have been published quarterly since the 1980s.
It comes amid signs of growing unrest among workers as soaring energy costs and disruption to global supply chains pushes up living costs at the fastest rate for more than a decade, leading employees to push for higher pay in wider sectors of the economy than where there are immediately obvious pressure points.
The institute has promised staff a 0.6% rise above the 2% settlement backdated to September – if its financial performance improves between now and the end of March, while benefits such as extra holidays have been awarded.
Meanwhile, the economists’ own forecasts suggest Britain’s current inflationary burst is likely to prove temporary. According to their latest estimates, a “wage-price spiral” is especially unlikely, following a reduction in trade union power in recent decades.
Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said the union was still ready to fight for a better pay deal.
“It’s astonishing that management are trying to fool economists by claiming they can’t afford to pay staff more. The workers play an important part in our national life and they have my full support,” she said.
A spokesperson for the NIESR said the pay offer was in-line with other similar organisations and came after a difficult year when the focus was on securing jobs without the need for government support.
“We have also committed, should the situation improve, to increasing our financial offer. We are therefore disappointed that strike action is now being considered by Unite, especially since we have been actively working with them in an attempt to resolve the situation.”
THE GUARDIAN
Wed 15 Dec 2021
Asking workers to stomach a below-inflation pay rise is never popular. Asking them to do so when their day job is forecasting the cost of living is really asking for trouble.
And so it has proved at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. A strike ballot opened on Wednesday for members of the Unite union after the NIESR’s management offered a basic pay deal worth 2%. It comes after wages were frozen last year.
With the latest official data showing the cost of living was up by 5.1% in year to November, the union is confident its members will vote to shut down their computers and stop working on their spreadsheets.
Staff at the institute, founded in 1938 by a group of leading social and economic reformers including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, are among the country’s pre-eminent forecasters of inflation, and have forecast average pay growth across the economy next year of 4.5%.
Now 21 Unite members, representing about half the total workforce, where average pay for economists and social researchers is between £22,000 and £41,000, predict a high probability of strike action outside the institute’s bookish Westminster offices.
The ballot will close on 7 January. Any action to down tools could affect research contracts which the NIESR has with other organisations, and its forecasts for the UK and global economies, which have been published quarterly since the 1980s.
It comes amid signs of growing unrest among workers as soaring energy costs and disruption to global supply chains pushes up living costs at the fastest rate for more than a decade, leading employees to push for higher pay in wider sectors of the economy than where there are immediately obvious pressure points.
The institute has promised staff a 0.6% rise above the 2% settlement backdated to September – if its financial performance improves between now and the end of March, while benefits such as extra holidays have been awarded.
Meanwhile, the economists’ own forecasts suggest Britain’s current inflationary burst is likely to prove temporary. According to their latest estimates, a “wage-price spiral” is especially unlikely, following a reduction in trade union power in recent decades.
Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, said the union was still ready to fight for a better pay deal.
“It’s astonishing that management are trying to fool economists by claiming they can’t afford to pay staff more. The workers play an important part in our national life and they have my full support,” she said.
A spokesperson for the NIESR said the pay offer was in-line with other similar organisations and came after a difficult year when the focus was on securing jobs without the need for government support.
“We have also committed, should the situation improve, to increasing our financial offer. We are therefore disappointed that strike action is now being considered by Unite, especially since we have been actively working with them in an attempt to resolve the situation.”
The Mariachi Rent Strike
For the last episode of our season, we take you through months of court battles, protests and tense negotiations in a Los Angeles rent strike.
When Francisco Gonzalez makes up his mind that he wants to do something, he does it.
He was the first member of his family to leave Tucson, Arizona, when he packed his car and left for Los Angeles in 2006. He found a tightknit immigrant community in the Boyle Heights neighborhood and an apartment a block from Mariachi Plaza, where mariachi musicians gather to offer their services for gigs. Some of his neighbors were in mariachi bands, and he’d wake up to them practicing in the morning.
“I think music always make you feel a little bit comfortable,” Gonzalez said. “Feeling that this building was alive.”
He would go on to live there for a decade, paying about $900 a month for the one-bedroom apartment. It was a bit below the average rent in LA at the time. But as quickly as Gonzalez settled into life in Boyle Heights, the neighborhood started changing around him.
Around Christmas 2016, his building got a new owner. By January, Gonzalez had received word that his rent would nearly double in the spring. He was devastated. To get a comparable home for the rent he was paying, Gonzalez would have to pack up his dog and move far outside the city.
This Is Uncomfortable
Hosted by Reema Khrais
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but this is way too much,” said Gonzalez, who had been pursuing acting while scraping together part-time jobs. “When April comes, I’m not going to have the $1,800.”
Over the past two decades, the median rent in this country has more than doubled. In a lot of cases it’s been a steady rise. But big, sudden rent hikes, like the one Gonzalez got, are often legal and do happen. So if you’re a renter, displacement can feel like a natural part of life. When a landlord doubles your rent, you get out.
But what happens when a group of tenants decide they don’t want to leave?
On this week’s show, the last of our fifth season, we’ll follow Gonzalez and his neighbors through a rent strike — involving lawyers, protests, tense sit-downs and, maybe, a way to stay in their homes.
Hankook Tire resumes operations at its plants in S. Korea after strike
All News 12:34 December 19, 2021
FONT SIZESEOUL, Dec. 19 (Yonhap) -- Hankook Tire & Technology Co., the world's sixth-largest tiremaker by sales, said it resumed operations at its two plants in South Korea on Sunday, 26 days after a strike began over this year's wage deal.
The deal reached Friday includes a 6 percent increase in basic monthly pay, 5 million won (US$4,200) in performance-based pay and a bonus of 2 million won per worker.
The agreement ended the strike that began Nov. 24. It marked the first strike since the foundation of the company's labor union in 1962.
A Hankook Tire official said the company plans to normalize the production at its two plants in South Korea, which have a combined daily production capacity of 100,000 units.
From January to September, Hankook Tire's net profit more than doubled to 525.4 billion won from 235.2 billion won a year earlier.
Hankook Tire earns over 80 percent of its total revenue from abroad.
It has eight plants -- two in South Korea, one in Hungary, one in the United States, three in China and one in Indonesia -- whose combined capacity reaches 102 million tires per year.
This undated photo, provided by Hankook Tire & Technology Co., shows the company's production facilities in Daejeon, about 160 kilometers south of Seoul. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
CHANEL KOREA WORKERS THREATEN STRIKE ACTION OVER UNPAID WAGES AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE
Posted by Louise Prance-Miles | Dec 10, 2021 |
THE WHAT? Chanel Korea workers have threatened strike action over unpaid wages and the company’s lagging efforts to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, according to a report by the Korea Herald.
THE DETAILS Workers within Chanel cosmetic stores have stated they will walk out on their jobs for an indefinite period from 17 December should the company fail to comply with their demands.
The members are part of the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, which is representing 390 store workers at 85 boutiques.
Kim So-hyeon, head of the union, said, “Our demands are clear. Chanel Korea shall pay holiday allowances, which have been overdue for the past two years, to shop workers. It should guarantee paid holidays, share operating profits with its workers and facilitate a working environment safe from sexual harassment.”
THE WHY? Holding a press conference outside the Chanel office in Jung-gu, central Seoul, the union stated that the company had not been paying employees for working holidays, nor working to eradicate sexual harassment issues.
Chanel stated it was, ‘thoroughly investigating the case.’
All News 12:34 December 19, 2021
FONT SIZESEOUL, Dec. 19 (Yonhap) -- Hankook Tire & Technology Co., the world's sixth-largest tiremaker by sales, said it resumed operations at its two plants in South Korea on Sunday, 26 days after a strike began over this year's wage deal.
The deal reached Friday includes a 6 percent increase in basic monthly pay, 5 million won (US$4,200) in performance-based pay and a bonus of 2 million won per worker.
The agreement ended the strike that began Nov. 24. It marked the first strike since the foundation of the company's labor union in 1962.
A Hankook Tire official said the company plans to normalize the production at its two plants in South Korea, which have a combined daily production capacity of 100,000 units.
From January to September, Hankook Tire's net profit more than doubled to 525.4 billion won from 235.2 billion won a year earlier.
Hankook Tire earns over 80 percent of its total revenue from abroad.
It has eight plants -- two in South Korea, one in Hungary, one in the United States, three in China and one in Indonesia -- whose combined capacity reaches 102 million tires per year.
This undated photo, provided by Hankook Tire & Technology Co., shows the company's production facilities in Daejeon, about 160 kilometers south of Seoul. (PHOTO NOT FOR SALE) (Yonhap)
CHANEL KOREA WORKERS THREATEN STRIKE ACTION OVER UNPAID WAGES AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN THE WORKPLACE
Posted by Louise Prance-Miles | Dec 10, 2021 |
THE WHAT? Chanel Korea workers have threatened strike action over unpaid wages and the company’s lagging efforts to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, according to a report by the Korea Herald.
THE DETAILS Workers within Chanel cosmetic stores have stated they will walk out on their jobs for an indefinite period from 17 December should the company fail to comply with their demands.
The members are part of the Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, which is representing 390 store workers at 85 boutiques.
Kim So-hyeon, head of the union, said, “Our demands are clear. Chanel Korea shall pay holiday allowances, which have been overdue for the past two years, to shop workers. It should guarantee paid holidays, share operating profits with its workers and facilitate a working environment safe from sexual harassment.”
THE WHY? Holding a press conference outside the Chanel office in Jung-gu, central Seoul, the union stated that the company had not been paying employees for working holidays, nor working to eradicate sexual harassment issues.
Chanel stated it was, ‘thoroughly investigating the case.’
LABOR HISTORY
100 Days That Changed Hollywood: The Writers Strike, 10 Years LaterA decade after scribes walked out over digital pay, The Hollywood Reporter gathers key players to reflect on the tension and "traitors," strategies and solidarity, picket-line romances and the ultimate deal that still impacts how the town runs today.
MATTHEW SIMMONS/WIREIMAGE
BY REBECCA FORD, LACEY ROSE
MAY 17, 2018
It was early 2006 when Damon Lindelof headed down to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to see advertisements for his television series Lost, then in its second season on ABC, blanketing the Apple Store. In that moment, he was tickled by the cachet of having his sci-fi creation be among the first series to roll out on Apple products. A few hours later, however, he got what his 11-year-old refers to as the “uh-oh” feeling. “It’s when your body is telling you that something is wrong,” he explains. “People were downloading Lost and paying $1.99 an episode. … I didn’t quite make the leap to, ‘I don’t get compensated for this at all.'
A year and a half later, he would. As would 12,000 other screenwriters who joined Lindelof on picket lines in Los Angeles and New York, as the Writers Guild of America waged war on the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers largely over pay for work that’s distributed via the internet, iPods, cellphones and other new media. The work stoppage — the industry’s first in nearly two decades — ultimately lasted 100 days and, according to the Milken Institute, took a $2.1 billion toll on the L.A. economy.
Now, 10 years later, THR gathers more than three dozen people involved to share their recollections of the charged period and answer the complicated question of whether it was all worth it.
On Nov. 2, 2007, after three months of negotiations, the Writers Guild announced that its members would strike if a deal was not reached by 12:01 a.m. Nov. 5.
SHAWN RYAN, THEN THE SHIELD SHOWRUNNER AND WGA NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE MEMBER The final day of negotiations was at the Sofitel Hotel. We all felt like, “We’re going to make a deal today.” But by about 3 or 4 o’clock that afternoon, it became clear to us that the other side wasn’t really interested in making a deal that day.
DAVID A. GOODMAN, THEN FAMILY GUY WRITER AND WGA BOARD MEMBER Their point of view was, “We don’t know what [the internet] is yet.” But Hulu went live [a month after] the strike ended. They knew where the business was going.
BARRY MEYER, THEN CHAIRMAN OF WARNER BROS. These new-media models were beginning to emerge. We said, “Let’s see what develops in three years. If there’s something really there, we’ll address it then.” It sounded perfectly logical to us, but there was a credibility issue that we had with the guilds because we’d made that same speech related to home video, and they had to fight for years to achieve their goals.
PATRIC VERRONE, THEN PRESIDENT OF WGA WEST It was brinkmanship. They were just going to call our bluff, and we weren’t bluffing. Next morning, we were out on strike.
STEVE LEVITAN, THEN BACK TO YOU SHOWRUNNER AND UNITED SHOWRUNNERS LEADER In past strikes, some showrunners worked as producers through the [stoppage]. But our goal was to make this one as short as possible, so anything that made the companies keep going, we felt would be detrimental. I’d worked at Leo Burnett in the ’80s, so I volunteered to do an ad with pledges from all of the biggest showrunners not to work in any capacity if we went on strike. The ad led to some showrunner meetings. Five minutes before the first big one, we were in a circle; it was Matt Weiner, me, I can’t remember who else, and someone said, “We need somebody to run this meeting.” Everybody turned and looked at me. In my mind, I thought, “Oh, fuck.”
SETH MACFARLANE, THEN FAMILY GUY SHOWRUNNER Those showrunner meetings were interesting because you didn’t have any hierarchy. It was a roomful of people who were each used to being the final voice in their respective rooms.
LORENZO DI BONAVENTURA, PRODUCER There was a total panic to get things moving as fast as we could in the hopes that the strike would not derail the movies we were putting together. For G.I. Joe, we brought on three writers and split up the script. It was really a Rubik’s Cube of trying to map out a process that I had never done before — and I have never done since.
BILLY RAY, SCREENWRITER I was doing a movie called State of Play. On the last day before the strike, everybody was arguing about the ending. I knew I couldn’t write another word starting the next morning, so I wrote 10 endings, and sent them all in and said, “Take your pick.”
KEVIN FALLS, THEN JOURNEYMAN SHOWRUNNER Journeyman was my first show on the air. I had talked Kevin McKidd, who had just finished Rome, into moving his wife and family to the U.S. from England to be the lead, and I felt responsible for now upending his life.
MARTI NOXON, THEN PRIVATE PRACTICE SHOWRUNNER I was running Private Practice with Shonda [Rhimes], and part of us was so tired that we were like, “Please, let’s have a strike.”
BEN SILVERMAN, THEN NBC CHAIRMAN I had been named chairman of NBC [five months earlier], and I remember asking [then CEO] Jeff Zucker, “What are we planning if there’s a strike?” The basic feeling there and in town was, “There’ll never be a strike.” Then bingo, it happens. The first thing hit were our late-night shows, where we built no contingency. We were super-well-positioned otherwise. I knew Biggest Loser could expand, I greenlit Phenomenon and American Gladiators. Then I came up with the idea of doing Celebrity Apprentice. I reached out to Mark Burnett, who said, “There’s no way Donald [Trump] will want to be around other celebrities. He has to be biggest celebrity.” And I said, “Actually, he’s going to be the biggest celebrity because he’s going to be the boss.” I called up Trump and he agreed, and we relaunched to huge ratings.
Hundreds and sometimes thousands of writers took to the picket lines, held daily outside the major studios in L.A. and corporate headquarters in New York.
GREG DANIELS, THEN THE OFFICE SHOWRUNNER I was the first writer to picket because I had to get to our set at 4 a.m. to try to prevent the Teamster caterers from crossing the line.
MICHAEL SCHUR, THEN THE OFFICE WRITER Steve Carell decided that if The Office couldn’t be produced with the writer-producers on set then he wasn’t going to make the show. So even though the “Dinner Party” episode was done and ready to be filmed, he just didn’t show up, and everything came to a grinding halt. The NBC lawyers and very high-powered suits pressured him like crazy, but he just calmly told them he wasn’t interested.
J.J. ABRAMS, SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR It was ridiculous. In the morning, I’d go to picket at Paramount as a writer. Then when my call time happened, I would have to put down the signs and go in as a director and work on a movie [Star Trek] that we couldn’t rewrite because the script had to be locked.
JANE ESPENSON, THEN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA WRITER I remember young writers — aspiring writers — approaching me to walk beside me on the picket line. It’s a strange situation, to give advice about getting into a business while you’re in the process of protesting conditions within that business.
RENE BALCER, THEN LAW & ORDER SHOWRUNNER Some development guy at Fox nudged his car through the line and bumped into me. He came out yelling. The police who investigated it called it mutual combat and decided not to press charges against him. Then I turned it into an episode of Law & Order, where there was a strike and some loudmouth gets run over. Yep, I monetized my experience.
ELENA TROPP, THEN SCREENWRITER My daughter Rosie was born in August 2007, so she came with me. We thought it would be funny to make signs for her, like, “Stop milking us.” The plus of wearing your baby while you’re doing this is that a lot of people came up to us, like Mindy Kaling, who asked to take a picture with my baby. Then we were on Defamer. The headline was, like, “Strike Baby spotted!” Once we knew we had an audience, we thought, “Let’s have some more fun with it.”
NOXON People who were single kept asking for introductions to other single writers [on the picket line]. It was Tinder before Tinder.
TONY GILROY, SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR We were looking for names to [picket]. I didn’t really know Ron Howard, but we shared an agent, so I called him and said, “Hey, man, is there any way …?” The guy was there in an hour.
RON HOWARD, DIRECTOR I was in the WGA, but I also had a production company so I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about me. They might feel my sympathy was on the other side. But I was very much welcomed.
KERRY EHRIN, THEN FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS WRITER I remember we were having a mother- son event at the school in my neighborhood, and this woman, who was the wife of an agent, just pointed at me: “She’s one of them!” It was funny and awful — like we were just a few steps away from the torches and pitchforks.
LEVITAN I remember at one point being at a rally where people were chanting these childish things aimed at the executives, and I’m thinking, “We’re not doing ourselves any favors here.” I just felt like it was beneath us. There was one sign that still makes me laugh, though: “Gary Newman’s wine has too many tannins.” Now, that was funny.
JOHN WELLS, SCREENWRITER AND FORMER WGA WEST PRESIDENT I remember walking the Fox picket with people chanting, “Hey, Chernin, what you earnin’?” after the executive [pay at Fox] came out, which was pretty great. I ran into [then News Corp. COO Peter] Chernin, and he thought it was fabulous, too.
ZAK PENN, SCREENWRITER My wife was a studio executive at New Line, and people were yelling at the execs as they were driving [onto the lot]. It left a bad taste in my mouth since I was sleeping with the other side.
MACFARLANE There was this animosity between showrunners who shut their shows down, like we did, and those who didn’t. But writers are so passive-aggressive, it came in the form of grumbling to each other.
Talks between the WGA and AMPTP broke down Dec. 7, after the two groups remained far apart on the key issue of new media.
MICHAEL LYNTON, THEN SONY CEO There came a moment where I was encouraged by a number of people to go visit [WGA executive director] David Young at the Writers Guild. I sat in the waiting room at the appointed time. And waited and waited. After 45 minutes, the receptionist called for the second or third time up to Young, and I could hear him say, “You should allow Mr. Lynton to wait there a while longer.” When I finally got into his office, it resulted in absolutely nothing.
LEVITAN I was really optimistic that a deal was going to happen before the holidays, and then I heard on the way to this Hanukkah dinner that [talks had broken down]. I was crushed. I get to this dinner, and [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and Michael Lynton are also there. I’m friends with those guys, and I make eye contact with them. The first moment that we could break off, the three of us walked off to a side room. I remember going, “What the fuck happened? Why can’t we solve this?”
LYNTON Running into friends who were writers in living rooms and kitchens was much more awkward than crossing a picket line.
LEVITAN Bob had this theory on what the problem was. He thought it had to do with WGA management and their negotiating tactics, and I took issue with that, but I quickly realized that they wanted to sit down and negotiate with a Hollywood insider.
VERRONE Management kept hammering, “David Young doesn’t understand the entertainment industry.” I joked that I did have to explain to him the difference between The Sopranos and The Simpsons, but other than that he understands what the entertainment industry is. They said, “We’ll meet with you if you bring in an entertainment lawyer.” So, we called in Alan Wertheimer.
ALAN WERTHEIMER, THEN OUTSIDE COUNSEL FOR THE WGA I got the call from David Young while I was at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t say yes right then. I knew if I got into this, I’d be out of the office for quite a while, and I needed to talk to my colleagues. What I had heard was that things had reached an impasse and that the parties didn’t like each other
It was early 2006 when Damon Lindelof headed down to the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to see advertisements for his television series Lost, then in its second season on ABC, blanketing the Apple Store. In that moment, he was tickled by the cachet of having his sci-fi creation be among the first series to roll out on Apple products. A few hours later, however, he got what his 11-year-old refers to as the “uh-oh” feeling. “It’s when your body is telling you that something is wrong,” he explains. “People were downloading Lost and paying $1.99 an episode. … I didn’t quite make the leap to, ‘I don’t get compensated for this at all.'
A year and a half later, he would. As would 12,000 other screenwriters who joined Lindelof on picket lines in Los Angeles and New York, as the Writers Guild of America waged war on the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers largely over pay for work that’s distributed via the internet, iPods, cellphones and other new media. The work stoppage — the industry’s first in nearly two decades — ultimately lasted 100 days and, according to the Milken Institute, took a $2.1 billion toll on the L.A. economy.
Now, 10 years later, THR gathers more than three dozen people involved to share their recollections of the charged period and answer the complicated question of whether it was all worth it.
On Nov. 2, 2007, after three months of negotiations, the Writers Guild announced that its members would strike if a deal was not reached by 12:01 a.m. Nov. 5.
SHAWN RYAN, THEN THE SHIELD SHOWRUNNER AND WGA NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE MEMBER The final day of negotiations was at the Sofitel Hotel. We all felt like, “We’re going to make a deal today.” But by about 3 or 4 o’clock that afternoon, it became clear to us that the other side wasn’t really interested in making a deal that day.
DAVID A. GOODMAN, THEN FAMILY GUY WRITER AND WGA BOARD MEMBER Their point of view was, “We don’t know what [the internet] is yet.” But Hulu went live [a month after] the strike ended. They knew where the business was going.
BARRY MEYER, THEN CHAIRMAN OF WARNER BROS. These new-media models were beginning to emerge. We said, “Let’s see what develops in three years. If there’s something really there, we’ll address it then.” It sounded perfectly logical to us, but there was a credibility issue that we had with the guilds because we’d made that same speech related to home video, and they had to fight for years to achieve their goals.
PATRIC VERRONE, THEN PRESIDENT OF WGA WEST It was brinkmanship. They were just going to call our bluff, and we weren’t bluffing. Next morning, we were out on strike.
STEVE LEVITAN, THEN BACK TO YOU SHOWRUNNER AND UNITED SHOWRUNNERS LEADER In past strikes, some showrunners worked as producers through the [stoppage]. But our goal was to make this one as short as possible, so anything that made the companies keep going, we felt would be detrimental. I’d worked at Leo Burnett in the ’80s, so I volunteered to do an ad with pledges from all of the biggest showrunners not to work in any capacity if we went on strike. The ad led to some showrunner meetings. Five minutes before the first big one, we were in a circle; it was Matt Weiner, me, I can’t remember who else, and someone said, “We need somebody to run this meeting.” Everybody turned and looked at me. In my mind, I thought, “Oh, fuck.”
SETH MACFARLANE, THEN FAMILY GUY SHOWRUNNER Those showrunner meetings were interesting because you didn’t have any hierarchy. It was a roomful of people who were each used to being the final voice in their respective rooms.
LORENZO DI BONAVENTURA, PRODUCER There was a total panic to get things moving as fast as we could in the hopes that the strike would not derail the movies we were putting together. For G.I. Joe, we brought on three writers and split up the script. It was really a Rubik’s Cube of trying to map out a process that I had never done before — and I have never done since.
BILLY RAY, SCREENWRITER I was doing a movie called State of Play. On the last day before the strike, everybody was arguing about the ending. I knew I couldn’t write another word starting the next morning, so I wrote 10 endings, and sent them all in and said, “Take your pick.”
KEVIN FALLS, THEN JOURNEYMAN SHOWRUNNER Journeyman was my first show on the air. I had talked Kevin McKidd, who had just finished Rome, into moving his wife and family to the U.S. from England to be the lead, and I felt responsible for now upending his life.
MARTI NOXON, THEN PRIVATE PRACTICE SHOWRUNNER I was running Private Practice with Shonda [Rhimes], and part of us was so tired that we were like, “Please, let’s have a strike.”
BEN SILVERMAN, THEN NBC CHAIRMAN I had been named chairman of NBC [five months earlier], and I remember asking [then CEO] Jeff Zucker, “What are we planning if there’s a strike?” The basic feeling there and in town was, “There’ll never be a strike.” Then bingo, it happens. The first thing hit were our late-night shows, where we built no contingency. We were super-well-positioned otherwise. I knew Biggest Loser could expand, I greenlit Phenomenon and American Gladiators. Then I came up with the idea of doing Celebrity Apprentice. I reached out to Mark Burnett, who said, “There’s no way Donald [Trump] will want to be around other celebrities. He has to be biggest celebrity.” And I said, “Actually, he’s going to be the biggest celebrity because he’s going to be the boss.” I called up Trump and he agreed, and we relaunched to huge ratings.
Hundreds and sometimes thousands of writers took to the picket lines, held daily outside the major studios in L.A. and corporate headquarters in New York.
GREG DANIELS, THEN THE OFFICE SHOWRUNNER I was the first writer to picket because I had to get to our set at 4 a.m. to try to prevent the Teamster caterers from crossing the line.
MICHAEL SCHUR, THEN THE OFFICE WRITER Steve Carell decided that if The Office couldn’t be produced with the writer-producers on set then he wasn’t going to make the show. So even though the “Dinner Party” episode was done and ready to be filmed, he just didn’t show up, and everything came to a grinding halt. The NBC lawyers and very high-powered suits pressured him like crazy, but he just calmly told them he wasn’t interested.
J.J. ABRAMS, SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR It was ridiculous. In the morning, I’d go to picket at Paramount as a writer. Then when my call time happened, I would have to put down the signs and go in as a director and work on a movie [Star Trek] that we couldn’t rewrite because the script had to be locked.
JANE ESPENSON, THEN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA WRITER I remember young writers — aspiring writers — approaching me to walk beside me on the picket line. It’s a strange situation, to give advice about getting into a business while you’re in the process of protesting conditions within that business.
RENE BALCER, THEN LAW & ORDER SHOWRUNNER Some development guy at Fox nudged his car through the line and bumped into me. He came out yelling. The police who investigated it called it mutual combat and decided not to press charges against him. Then I turned it into an episode of Law & Order, where there was a strike and some loudmouth gets run over. Yep, I monetized my experience.
ELENA TROPP, THEN SCREENWRITER My daughter Rosie was born in August 2007, so she came with me. We thought it would be funny to make signs for her, like, “Stop milking us.” The plus of wearing your baby while you’re doing this is that a lot of people came up to us, like Mindy Kaling, who asked to take a picture with my baby. Then we were on Defamer. The headline was, like, “Strike Baby spotted!” Once we knew we had an audience, we thought, “Let’s have some more fun with it.”
NOXON People who were single kept asking for introductions to other single writers [on the picket line]. It was Tinder before Tinder.
TONY GILROY, SCREENWRITER-DIRECTOR We were looking for names to [picket]. I didn’t really know Ron Howard, but we shared an agent, so I called him and said, “Hey, man, is there any way …?” The guy was there in an hour.
RON HOWARD, DIRECTOR I was in the WGA, but I also had a production company so I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about me. They might feel my sympathy was on the other side. But I was very much welcomed.
KERRY EHRIN, THEN FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS WRITER I remember we were having a mother- son event at the school in my neighborhood, and this woman, who was the wife of an agent, just pointed at me: “She’s one of them!” It was funny and awful — like we were just a few steps away from the torches and pitchforks.
LEVITAN I remember at one point being at a rally where people were chanting these childish things aimed at the executives, and I’m thinking, “We’re not doing ourselves any favors here.” I just felt like it was beneath us. There was one sign that still makes me laugh, though: “Gary Newman’s wine has too many tannins.” Now, that was funny.
JOHN WELLS, SCREENWRITER AND FORMER WGA WEST PRESIDENT I remember walking the Fox picket with people chanting, “Hey, Chernin, what you earnin’?” after the executive [pay at Fox] came out, which was pretty great. I ran into [then News Corp. COO Peter] Chernin, and he thought it was fabulous, too.
ZAK PENN, SCREENWRITER My wife was a studio executive at New Line, and people were yelling at the execs as they were driving [onto the lot]. It left a bad taste in my mouth since I was sleeping with the other side.
MACFARLANE There was this animosity between showrunners who shut their shows down, like we did, and those who didn’t. But writers are so passive-aggressive, it came in the form of grumbling to each other.
Talks between the WGA and AMPTP broke down Dec. 7, after the two groups remained far apart on the key issue of new media.
MICHAEL LYNTON, THEN SONY CEO There came a moment where I was encouraged by a number of people to go visit [WGA executive director] David Young at the Writers Guild. I sat in the waiting room at the appointed time. And waited and waited. After 45 minutes, the receptionist called for the second or third time up to Young, and I could hear him say, “You should allow Mr. Lynton to wait there a while longer.” When I finally got into his office, it resulted in absolutely nothing.
LEVITAN I was really optimistic that a deal was going to happen before the holidays, and then I heard on the way to this Hanukkah dinner that [talks had broken down]. I was crushed. I get to this dinner, and [Disney CEO] Bob Iger and Michael Lynton are also there. I’m friends with those guys, and I make eye contact with them. The first moment that we could break off, the three of us walked off to a side room. I remember going, “What the fuck happened? Why can’t we solve this?”
LYNTON Running into friends who were writers in living rooms and kitchens was much more awkward than crossing a picket line.
LEVITAN Bob had this theory on what the problem was. He thought it had to do with WGA management and their negotiating tactics, and I took issue with that, but I quickly realized that they wanted to sit down and negotiate with a Hollywood insider.
VERRONE Management kept hammering, “David Young doesn’t understand the entertainment industry.” I joked that I did have to explain to him the difference between The Sopranos and The Simpsons, but other than that he understands what the entertainment industry is. They said, “We’ll meet with you if you bring in an entertainment lawyer.” So, we called in Alan Wertheimer.
ALAN WERTHEIMER, THEN OUTSIDE COUNSEL FOR THE WGA I got the call from David Young while I was at the Sundance Film Festival. I didn’t say yes right then. I knew if I got into this, I’d be out of the office for quite a while, and I needed to talk to my colleagues. What I had heard was that things had reached an impasse and that the parties didn’t like each other
.
As the strike threatened to drag into the new year, many late-night hosts announced they’d return, largely sans writers, as early as Jan. 2. The 65th Golden Globe Awards, slated for Jan. 13, was canceled, with the winners announced at a no-frills press conference instead.
JIMMY KIMMEL, JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! HOST The strike basically wiped out all my savings because I was paying a lot of the staff that was out of work. That’s a big reason why I had to go back on the air. I wasn’t making a ton of money at the time, and I couldn’t afford to do it anymore. I also felt if we stayed off the air, it was going to do permanent damage to our shows.
VERRONE We decided to make a side deal with David Letterman’s company [Dec. 28] so that [The Late Show and The Late Late Show] could go back to work. That was rife with complications, not the least of which was the fact that Jay Leno’s writers suddenly said, “What about us?” But they were employed by NBC, while Letterman employed his writers directly.
STEVE BODOW, THE DAILY SHOW WRITER It wasn’t an easy time. After years of us being in battle together every day making this show, for the first time we were on the opposite side of something. Jon [Stewart] was very frustrated — he’d worked out a deal with somebody to offer the same terms Letterman had, but the deal wasn’t accepted [by the guild]. It was uncomfortable because, in general, Jon was very loyal to the writers and the writers were loyal to Jon, and this tested that.
KIMMEL For the most part, it brought a lot of us [hosts] together, especially when the CBS shows got to go back [with writers] and we didn’t. That really made everyone mad. For the record, that was not a good idea. But we were all talking. Nobody wanted to be the first back. We all wanted to go back at the same time.
As the strike threatened to drag into the new year, many late-night hosts announced they’d return, largely sans writers, as early as Jan. 2. The 65th Golden Globe Awards, slated for Jan. 13, was canceled, with the winners announced at a no-frills press conference instead.
JIMMY KIMMEL, JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! HOST The strike basically wiped out all my savings because I was paying a lot of the staff that was out of work. That’s a big reason why I had to go back on the air. I wasn’t making a ton of money at the time, and I couldn’t afford to do it anymore. I also felt if we stayed off the air, it was going to do permanent damage to our shows.
VERRONE We decided to make a side deal with David Letterman’s company [Dec. 28] so that [The Late Show and The Late Late Show] could go back to work. That was rife with complications, not the least of which was the fact that Jay Leno’s writers suddenly said, “What about us?” But they were employed by NBC, while Letterman employed his writers directly.
STEVE BODOW, THE DAILY SHOW WRITER It wasn’t an easy time. After years of us being in battle together every day making this show, for the first time we were on the opposite side of something. Jon [Stewart] was very frustrated — he’d worked out a deal with somebody to offer the same terms Letterman had, but the deal wasn’t accepted [by the guild]. It was uncomfortable because, in general, Jon was very loyal to the writers and the writers were loyal to Jon, and this tested that.
KIMMEL For the most part, it brought a lot of us [hosts] together, especially when the CBS shows got to go back [with writers] and we didn’t. That really made everyone mad. For the record, that was not a good idea. But we were all talking. Nobody wanted to be the first back. We all wanted to go back at the same time.
JORGE CAMERA, THEN PRESIDENT OF THE HFPA We tried every which way we could [to still have the Golden Globes]. I was even told I should go chain myself to the Writers Guild and not leave until they let us have them. Once the actors joined the strike and would not cross the picket line, there was no choice for us.
SILVERMAN I got in all of this trouble because I went on the radio and said, “It’s like the guys who weren’t invited to the prom are canceling prom even though the Golden Globes have nothing to do with the strike.” I was not only furious because it was the only awards show canceled that year and the network was being leveraged horribly and hurt financially but also I was nominated for three shows [as a producer] and I wasn’t going to be in that awesome room.
On Jan. 14 , dubbed by the media “Black Monday,” the major studios axed more than 40 writer-producer overall deals, citing the “force majeure” clause, which allows a party to break a contract in the wake of an unforeseeable event. The loss of millions of dollars roiled the WGA membership, with some groups pushing for a swift end to the strike.
FALLS There was talk that the studios might force majeure writers’ overall deals, but I naively thought I wasn’t going to be one of them. Then my agent called and told me I was being “forced.” I thought he was joking. Then Jennifer Salke [then at 20th Century Fox TV] beeped in, and I knew I was a goner.
HOWARD MICHAEL GOULD, SCREENWRITER AND THEN WGA NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE MEMBER I was told that there was a group [nicknamed The Dirty 30] that had been meeting. They were concerned about the direction things had been going. They were upper-middle-class writers, and I was told they were going to go public with a statement demanding that the Writers Guild pledge, even before the DGA deal was sealed, to accept the parameters of that deal. I was given a name and a number and I called.
VERRONE To this day, I have no idea who was in The Dirty 30.
JONATHAN PRINCE, THEN CANE SHOWRUNNER Am I the only one admitting I was in it? I remember we left this one meeting and there were fliers on each of our cars that basically said, “You’re a traitor, I know who you are.”
GOULD I negotiated a sit-down. Robert King and I went to Jonathan Prince’s house. There were about three dozen of them. And they were furious. They tore into us for two hours. Our message to them was, “We know you’re hurting, but there’s nothing to be accomplished by doing what you’re going to do before the DGA makes their deal. If you do this, it will undermine the DGA’s negotiation.”
PRINCE We never undermined the negotiations. I know that in order to make any gains, there must be pain. We just thought that the pain should have been ours, the writers, it shouldn’t have been others’ to bear. And getting a bigger piece of the backend of this future technology doesn’t trickle down to [nonwriters]. How would that have helped my caterer who lost her mortgage or my greensman who had to move out of L.A.? We weren’t traitors. By day, we were walking the picket line and reporting to our strike captains; and by night, we were saying, “How do we get this thing to end?”
RAY We were really afraid that the DGA would begin to negotiate their deal while we were still out there. It was all anyone talked about: Is the DGA going to torpedo us? I reached out to a bunch of writer-directors and I invited them to my house. There was 40 of us, and we began to call ourselves “The WD-40.” We wrote the DGA asking them to stay out of their negotiations until our strike was resolved. We called people to try to get them to sign the letter. I only had one guy who basically told me to go jump in the lake — it was John Carpenter.
KEN ZIFFREN, OUTSIDE COUNSEL FOR THE DGA There was pressure put on by the Writers Guild. But the DGA firmly believed if you make a deal sufficiently ahead of time to take the pressure off of management, you’re going to make a better deal than if you stumble into it last minute, or even after a short period of strikes.
The DGA signed its new deal Jan. 17, 2008. After that, key factions within the WGA pushed aggressively for the strike to end. Both sides returned to the table in an attempt to hammer out a contract.
WELLS Once the DGA made that deal, our bargaining position was significantly reduced.
MICHAEL WINSHIP, THEN WGA EAST PRESIDENT That was a low point. God bless ’em, they got a deal, but we felt strongly that they fell on our backs.
GILROY I was very disappointed in the Directors Guild, and angry. If we could’ve pressed just a little bit further and really threatened to shut down the Academy Awards. … I would have been willing to not go to the Oscars.
AARON SORKIN, SCREENWRITER Paul Attanasio called and asked if I’d come to a meeting at his house. There were about 20 people, including a former president and a former vice president of the Guild. The DGA had just approved their contract, and people in the room who knew what they were talking about felt that the terms were the best we were going to get.
AKIVA GOLDSMAN, SCREENWRITER The emotional fuel for the strike had started to outpace the potential gains. We were sitting around [at Attanasio’s house] going, “Let’s get our hands in this in a more direct way.”
MEYER Leslie [Moonves], [Chernin], [Iger] and I met fairly regularly to talk strategy. We had a standing table at the Bel Air Hotel.
RYAN The issue was we were a group of decision-makers who were empowered to make a deal and we spent months in a room with people who weren’t — people who then had to go back to some room and call [the CEOs].
VERRONE So we said, “In exchange for us bringing Wertheimer, you’ve got to bring in CEOs.”
WERTHEIMER Once we were close to the finish line, those guys [Iger and Chernin] started showing up. Then we made some progress.
VERRONE Chernin and Iger represented the two factions of the AMPTP. Chernin was the hard-liner who represented Fox, NBC and Warner Bros. The other side was Iger, whose best interest was in making sure the Academy Awards went off in a few weeks, and Moonves, who was looking to make a deal much earlier than anybody else.
RYAN If we had been negotiating only with CBS, there never would have been a strike. It didn’t make sense for them. For a company like Fox, which didn’t have as many hours of programming and relied very heavily on American Idol at that time, they had a different perspective.
VERRONE Those final negotiations took about a day and a half. We were at the Luxe Hotel under a press blackout.
JOHN BOWMAN, WGA NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE CHAIR At the end, there was a lot of confusion about what we would settle on. I’m not sure we even knew what our bottom line was. The negotiating committee was made up largely of showrunners, and the board had a slightly more proletarian, workaday-writer feel. There was a sense that some on the board might hold out for animation or DVDs. My feeling was we needed a win, and we needed to be unified. I was getting phone calls from labor leaders all over the country throughout saying, “Labor’s taking a hit. You have to win this.” A public split would have been a disaster.
After 100 days, on Feb. 12, 2008, more than 90 percent of the WGA voted to end the strike. On Feb. 26, WGA membership approved a three-year contract, with the Writers Guild winning a piece of digital revenue.
WINSHIP I had decided to go ahead and have the [WGA East] awards because I thought it would be good for morale. It turned out to be this incredible fortuitous coincidence. We had the meeting to announce the end [of the strike], immediately followed by this party.
GOLDSMAN Our business — how deals worked, how writers worked within the system — has never been the same.
BRYAN FULLER, THEN PUSHING DAISIES SHOWRUNNER It’s no exaggeration to say there was a punitive cloud that wove across writers rooms and interactions with studios for years. There was a lot of blame going around.
TROPP I stopped writing not that much longer after the strike. It became so much harder to get jobs. Rosie’s in the fifth grade now, we live in South Carolina, and we showed her some of those old pictures from the picket line. She’s going through a social justice phase, so it was a nice entree to, “This is a union and this is what unions do. I’m sorry that at the end of that strike there wasn’t room for me writing movies anymore, but that’s OK, too.
”
FALLS Journeyman never got a second season. But for Kevin McKidd, I’m relieved to say, it turned into a pot of gold. The next year he started his first of 10 seasons on Grey’s Anatomy. He also learned to surf. …
VERRONE We absolutely didn’t get everything we wanted, but getting the jurisdiction in new media completely changed the way writers, actors, directors and the entire industry are employed. If we hadn’t done that, Netflix wouldn’t be what it is today, which is the company that employs something like a third of our members now.
WELLS Patric and some of the other leaders, who did a courageous job running this strike and standing up to tremendous pressure, were later punished electorally. But they were planting seeds for the future.
RYAN I don’t know that you can look at the landscape in 2018 with everything that’s playing online and not see that us caving and not winning jurisdiction over the internet would be anything other than an utter disaster for the creative community.
Additional reporting by Michael O’Connell.
FALLS Journeyman never got a second season. But for Kevin McKidd, I’m relieved to say, it turned into a pot of gold. The next year he started his first of 10 seasons on Grey’s Anatomy. He also learned to surf. …
VERRONE We absolutely didn’t get everything we wanted, but getting the jurisdiction in new media completely changed the way writers, actors, directors and the entire industry are employed. If we hadn’t done that, Netflix wouldn’t be what it is today, which is the company that employs something like a third of our members now.
WELLS Patric and some of the other leaders, who did a courageous job running this strike and standing up to tremendous pressure, were later punished electorally. But they were planting seeds for the future.
RYAN I don’t know that you can look at the landscape in 2018 with everything that’s playing online and not see that us caving and not winning jurisdiction over the internet would be anything other than an utter disaster for the creative community.
Additional reporting by Michael O’Connell.
‘Communist Daughter’ Director on Uber-Left Comedy, Socialism and Marxism: “They’re Worth Fighting For”
"My father went through a Marxist phase," says Leah Cameron, creator, showrunner and director of the Web Series World Cup winning political satire.
BY ETAN VLESSING
“Because the 1980s was a consumerist time, Reaganism was all about tax cuts for the rich and there was a lot of America Ra Ra Ra and American military power and all those things gave the family more to be opposed to, but also made them feel more like odd ducks,” Cameron explained.
The challenge in The Communist’s Daughter was to portray the McDougalds with humor and heart and get past the veneer of little c communism to what that ideology calls for, including less inequality and more social progress for common people.
Here Cameron’s farce about the daughter of happily married Communists caught between fitting in at high school and singing the praises of socialism points up the elaborate delusions and lies many people construct to fight decades-old cultural wars. “I was excited to find the comedy in that and how we on both sides of the political spectrum stereotype people,” she insisted.
Cameron argued the lost world of Soviet Russia communism and Reaganomics is distant enough to allow her web series to play for laughs. “Trickle-down economics, who thought that was a good idea? Didn’t work out that well, didn’t it,” she insists.
Cameron adds audience reaction online to The Communist’s Daughter has been forthright, whether from the right or the left. “It can be like, ‘I’m a communist. I feel personally attacked,’ or ‘this is dangerous. This is how (communist dictatorship) starts,” she explains.
The Communist’s Daughter is executive produced by Lauren Corber of LoCo Motion Pictures, Josh Gal, Emer Connon and Cameron, with Natalie Novak of Natalie Novak Films serving as producer.
"My father went through a Marxist phase," says Leah Cameron, creator, showrunner and director of the Web Series World Cup winning political satire.
BY ETAN VLESSING
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
DECEMBER 9, 2021 2:54PM
DECEMBER 9, 2021 2:54PM
The Communist's Daughter COURTESY OF CONOR FISHER
Leah Cameron takes pride in The Communist’s Daughter having an unabashed socialist streak, even if her Canadian uber-left web comedy is a world away from Russian bread lines and iron-fisted Stalinism.
“I’m excited about the comedy that comes from black and white thinking that some people have in America, about communism being the enemy,” Cameron, who created, show ran and directed the recent winner of the coveted Web Series World Cup, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In her native Canada, where snowbirds vacation in Cuba and Russian cars are popular with local drivers, socialism as a word has shades of meaning. “I wanted to make a show where even if the quest of the politics and the neighborhood gets petty and silly, we can still see the positive in the ideals of socialism and Marxism, and they’re worth fighting for,” Cameron added.
The Communist’s Daughter — set in 1989 during the Ronald Reagan era just as the West and capitalism were about to win the Cold War — portrays the Bolshevik McDougald family fighting against that political tide. The personal and the political come together in the titular character, 15-year-old Dunyasha, played by Sofia Banzhaf, who is mortified as her Marxist father picks her up at school in a spluttering Russian army vehicle just as she falls for her high school heartthrob, played by Kolton Stewart.
The McDougalds, led by neighborhood Pinko parents played by Aaron Poole and Jessica Holmes, in their madcap adventures are less about pushing political radicalism than just having outsized dreams of society sharing the wealth in a workers’ paradise. “My father went through a Marxist phase, calling himself a communist at the height of the Reagan 80s. It just seemed normal to me,” Cameron recalled.
She added the series — part political satire, a send-up of 1980s America and its devotion to consumer capitalism — is more an exaggerated account of her high school years in Toronto delivered with gentle sarcasm and wit. During her youth, Cameron’s father did drive a Russian-made Lada 4 X 4 and ran (unsuccessfully) for political office, which echoes Dunyasha’s father, Ian, in the web series campaigning in local politics by espousing sentimental delusions about socialism on the doorstep.
The sophisticated satire in The Communist’s Daughter comes from the patent fact that Ian McDougald, a modern-day Don Quixote, denies the collapse of communism just as the Berlin Wall falls and chooses to keep his family in an ersatz reality.
Leah Cameron takes pride in The Communist’s Daughter having an unabashed socialist streak, even if her Canadian uber-left web comedy is a world away from Russian bread lines and iron-fisted Stalinism.
“I’m excited about the comedy that comes from black and white thinking that some people have in America, about communism being the enemy,” Cameron, who created, show ran and directed the recent winner of the coveted Web Series World Cup, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In her native Canada, where snowbirds vacation in Cuba and Russian cars are popular with local drivers, socialism as a word has shades of meaning. “I wanted to make a show where even if the quest of the politics and the neighborhood gets petty and silly, we can still see the positive in the ideals of socialism and Marxism, and they’re worth fighting for,” Cameron added.
The Communist’s Daughter — set in 1989 during the Ronald Reagan era just as the West and capitalism were about to win the Cold War — portrays the Bolshevik McDougald family fighting against that political tide. The personal and the political come together in the titular character, 15-year-old Dunyasha, played by Sofia Banzhaf, who is mortified as her Marxist father picks her up at school in a spluttering Russian army vehicle just as she falls for her high school heartthrob, played by Kolton Stewart.
The McDougalds, led by neighborhood Pinko parents played by Aaron Poole and Jessica Holmes, in their madcap adventures are less about pushing political radicalism than just having outsized dreams of society sharing the wealth in a workers’ paradise. “My father went through a Marxist phase, calling himself a communist at the height of the Reagan 80s. It just seemed normal to me,” Cameron recalled.
She added the series — part political satire, a send-up of 1980s America and its devotion to consumer capitalism — is more an exaggerated account of her high school years in Toronto delivered with gentle sarcasm and wit. During her youth, Cameron’s father did drive a Russian-made Lada 4 X 4 and ran (unsuccessfully) for political office, which echoes Dunyasha’s father, Ian, in the web series campaigning in local politics by espousing sentimental delusions about socialism on the doorstep.
The sophisticated satire in The Communist’s Daughter comes from the patent fact that Ian McDougald, a modern-day Don Quixote, denies the collapse of communism just as the Berlin Wall falls and chooses to keep his family in an ersatz reality.
“Because the 1980s was a consumerist time, Reaganism was all about tax cuts for the rich and there was a lot of America Ra Ra Ra and American military power and all those things gave the family more to be opposed to, but also made them feel more like odd ducks,” Cameron explained.
The challenge in The Communist’s Daughter was to portray the McDougalds with humor and heart and get past the veneer of little c communism to what that ideology calls for, including less inequality and more social progress for common people.
Here Cameron’s farce about the daughter of happily married Communists caught between fitting in at high school and singing the praises of socialism points up the elaborate delusions and lies many people construct to fight decades-old cultural wars. “I was excited to find the comedy in that and how we on both sides of the political spectrum stereotype people,” she insisted.
Cameron argued the lost world of Soviet Russia communism and Reaganomics is distant enough to allow her web series to play for laughs. “Trickle-down economics, who thought that was a good idea? Didn’t work out that well, didn’t it,” she insists.
Cameron adds audience reaction online to The Communist’s Daughter has been forthright, whether from the right or the left. “It can be like, ‘I’m a communist. I feel personally attacked,’ or ‘this is dangerous. This is how (communist dictatorship) starts,” she explains.
The Communist’s Daughter is executive produced by Lauren Corber of LoCo Motion Pictures, Josh Gal, Emer Connon and Cameron, with Natalie Novak of Natalie Novak Films serving as producer.
TRAVELING CARD
USA
Ongoing San Antonio strike leads to musicians playing at orchestras across the country
Clarinetist Stephanie Key is performing a Christmas-themed concert with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Key remains hopeful in the future of San Antonio's Symphony.
SAN ANTONIO — Daniel Taubenheim woke up Friday morning from his new home in Phoenix, Arizona, remembering the first time he heard the San Antonio Symphony.
“I will never forget that experience. I just won a job with a professional orchestra and they sound amazing,” Taubenheim said.
He’s one of dozens of musicians who’ve found work at other orchestras across Texas and the nation due to the ongoing strike after symphony management proposed to cut pay and the size of the symphony.
The trumpeter had played with the San Antonio Symphony since 2016. Taubenheim also taught trumpet at local universities.
He resigned from his teaching positions at local universities but remains with the San Antonio Symphony during the ongoing strike.
Stripped health insurance combined with the proposal of reducing fulltime musician pay from $35,000 to $24,000 annually doesn’t bode well for the striking musicians.
“The symphony’s (San Antonio Symphony) financial proposals would have made a huge loss,” Taubenheim said.
Kenneth Freudigman has spent the last 21 seasons with the San Antonio Symphony as principal cellist.
“We are the seventh largest city in the country. It is a crime that we are on the edge of losing the symphony,” Freudigman said. “Their contract asking for an A/B split where there are a core which is not paying even a living wage and then a B which pays poverty levels is not a model that I want to be a part of.”
For the past several weeks, he’s played with the Atlanta Symphony.
“Atlanta gets it. They understand what a thriving arts community means to an entire city,” he said.
However, Freudigman stressed there are personal drawbacks to performing multiple weeks in a different city.
While that is great for me artistically and financially it’s helping me, it’s also the problem is that it’s taking me away from my family. It’s taking me away from my seventh grader who is back in school,” Freudigman said.
Stephanie Key and her husband are warming up for a Christmas concert alongside the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. While they’re grateful for the opportunity, Key noted she wishes she could perform in San Antonio.
But until there’s an agreement met between the symphony board and musicians union, Key will be playing her clarinet professionally at different organizations.
Key and other San Antonio musicians have received invites to perform from more than 30 orchestras nationwide. Cities include Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York.
“People can’t, they shouldn’t stay in San Antonio if they’re not going to be appreciated, they need to play,” she said.
Corey Cowart, executive director of the San Antonio Symphony expressed optimism in the future of the symphony despite the months-long strike that’s resulted in no agreed solution from both parties.
In a statement, Cowart said:
"We understand the difficult choice the extended contract negotiations and strike has forced on our musicians. We’ve offered binding arbitration and mediation with neutral mediators and arbitrators in an effort to resolve the strike before the musicians have had to make these decisions. So far, the musicians’ union has refused both and has not provided a proposal since September.
It's important to note that our musicians have always played in other cities both outside of our season and during it as well, so we are not surprised that they are performing in other symphonies at all - they've done so for years. In fact, several of our musicians had pre-planned sabbaticals or requested for leave to play with other organizations before the start of our season. We are fortunate that San Antonio is home to many talented musicians, we believe when a sustainable contract is achieved, we will retain and attract performers."
The ongoing strike has resulted in canceled performances including Handel's Mesiah, which was scheduled for December 22-23.
Meanwhile, Taubenheim is ready to perform for the Phoenix Symphony's Handel's Mesiah on December 17. After Taubenheim's one-year stint at the Arizona orchestra, it's not known for sure what the future holds. But he longs for the day when the strike ends and the San Antonio Symphony can make a comeback and perform at the Tobin Center.
“I’m happy to be performing. This orchestra’s (Phoenix Symphony) awesome. But yeah, the whole things been a little hard and just odd not being in my normal orchestra.”