Nonfiction entertainment workers who are members of the Writers Guild of America East have ratified a first union agreement with prestige documentary company Story Syndicate.
Story Syndicate employees who belong to the WGA East, roughly 30 in total, many of them producers, unanimously voted to greenlight the deal after it was reached on June 6.
Founded in 2019 by husband-and-wife creative duo Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan, Story Syndicate has become a go-to producer of glossy streaming documentaries in recent years, from Netflix’s Icarus and Britney vs Spears to Hulu’s Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence. The company’s latest is Titan: The Oceangate Scandal, which premiered on Netflix on June 11.
In a statement, Garbus and Cogan called the company’s first WGA contract a “win-win.” The deal, they said, “opens up access to portable healthcare for our freelancers, as well as many other provisions that support our workers’ well-being” while at the same time fitting “within the constraints of current market realities, enabling us to remain highly competitive in the budgeting of our productions.”
Beyond offering staffers access to the entertainment industry’s so-called “Flex Plan,” which freelancers can take with them from job to job, the contract establishes minimum wage rates and provides for annual pay increases. The deal enshrines rest periods of nine for exempt employees or 10 hours for non-exempt staffers, as well as overtime pay for working a seventh day in a week and partial pay if an employee is informed of a “dark day” — or a day when a production is on hiatus — within less than a week.
The deal further offers paid vacation, bereavement and sick days, paid holidays and two weeks’ paid paternal leave, among other language.
Story Syndicate voluntarily recognized, or agreed to work with the union without both parties participating in a formal National Labor Relations Board election, in August 2023. At the same time, the company recognized a union of postproduction workers that sought to join the Motion Picture Editors Guild, an IATSE Local.
While negotiations with the WGA East produced an agreement within the two years since, the Editors Guild is still at odds with Story Syndicate over its talks. In early June, postproduction workers protested the premiere of the Titan documentary, decrying alleged delays and retractions in negotiations. The Editors Guild currently has an unfair labor practice charge pending against the company at the National Labor Relations Board.
In a statement about their deal, the Story Syndicate bargaining committee said that they hope it will “help set precedents throughout the nonfiction TV/film industry.” The group added, “We stand in solidarity with our colleagues at Motion Picture Editors Guild IATSE Local 700 (MPEG)’s ongoing contract negotiations with Story Syndicate.”
