Contract Bulletins

The Writers' Guild-Industry Health Fund (Health Fund) and the Producer-Writers Guild of America Pension Plan (Pension Plan) are fundamental elements of economic security for writers. These portable health and pension benefits enable a highly-trained freelance workforce to be available to create the movies and series that earn billions for the media companies.

The Health Fund and Pension Plan are both separate legal entities from the WGA, administered by trustees representing both unions and the employers.

In this negotiation, writers need additional contributions to the Health Fund and Pension Plan to protect their solvency and ensure sustainable benefits for writers going forward.

Why We Need More Healthcare Funding

Our Health Fund is currently operating at a deficit produced by the combination of two factors: the contraction and rising healthcare costs.

Contraction Lowers Contributions and Pushes Writers onto Points

The Health Fund’s income comes from employer contributions on writer earnings, up to certain earnings caps. Some of these caps have not increased in twenty years.

For our Health Fund to remain stable, the contributions for active participants must be sufficient to cover the expenses of working writers, non-working writers on Extended Coverage points, retirees, and dependents.

In the Peak TV period, the companies significantly increased the volume of series and movies they produced, bringing thousands more writers and their dependents into the Health Fund. During this period, many writers also accumulated Extended Coverage points. Now, the industry’s significant pullback in spending means that fewer writers are working. This means contributions to the Fund are reduced, and many writers are relying on accumulated Extended Coverage points to sustain their health coverage. In total, this has added $37 million in plan costs in 2025.

Over the past several negotiation cycles, we’ve increased employer contribution rates. We made additional gains for the Health Fund in 2023, including increased contributions for writing teams and a new writer-producer minimum. However, the severity of the contraction and the increase in writers using Extended Coverage points mean that the current contribution rate is not enough to keep up with costs.

This problem is compounded by caps on the amount of writer earnings that generate pension and health contributions, which effectively give the companies a discount on the contributions.

For example, the health fund contribution limit is $250,000 for any given screen project—meaning that employers make no contributions to the health fund on earnings over $250,000 for a given writer. Similarly, the contribution limit for overall deal income is $275,000 per year. The screen compensation limit was last increased in 2004; the overall deal contribution limit was last increased in 2018. The WGA has proposed to increase various of these limits in each of the last five negotiations, but other than the minimal increase to the overall deal cap in 2018, the companies have refused.

Health Fund Income Already Includes Tens of Millions from Writers

The current contribution rate of 13% has been reached through successive bargaining cycles. Often, these increases have been paid for by forgoing increases to the minimums. Over the last 12 years, 4% of that 13% contribution rate was diverted or foregone from minimum increases to writers, totaling $64 million annually in health contributions at this point. Instead of going directly to writers’ pockets, this money diverted from minimums accounts for 30% of the health funding obligation year after year.

Between caps and diverted minimum increases, the effective contribution rate on all writer income is notably lower than the nominal rate of 13%. The companies can reasonably afford to increase contributions to adequately fund the health plan.

Healthcare Inflation Raises Costs

While the contraction reduces the Health Fund’s income and increases its liabilities, the rising cost of healthcare drives up plan expenses every year. Healthcare cost inflation far outpaces more general inflation rates. The lack of competition among healthcare providers—from hospital systems to drug companies to pharmacy benefit managers—allows them to sharply raise prices every year, regardless of provider quality.

The Guild Health Fund offers a PPO plan, allowing access to a broad network of providers—including UCLA and Cedars-Sinai, in Los Angeles, and New York Presbyterian and NYU Langone, in New York—that charge a wide range of costs for services. Participants can select any provider within the PPO to be covered by our in-network benefit. However, little public information allows participants to understand cost and quality differences across various providers. In-network plan costs have risen 13% per year since 2019.

The Health Fund has made efforts to manage costs. It directs participants to generic drugs. It uses a service provider called Greenlight that negotiates lower rates for some out-of-network services. It has also introduced no-cost surgical procedures through a curated network of vetted surgeons called Lantern. These options help reduce members’ out-of-pocket costs and save the plan money, but they have not been enough to curb rising costs.

Since 2022, plan expenses have exceeded contributions.

At this rate, the plan will run out of reserves during the term of the next MBA.

The Health Fund spent down some reserves during the 2023 strike, demonstrating the necessity of reserves to be able to run a strike to fight for the contract writers need. Returning to a place of running surpluses will build up Health Fund reserves. Given the skyrocketing levels of healthcare inflation, this will require plan design changes that will save money while preserving access to high-quality providers, in addition to increased revenues.

Healthcare was a major issue in 2017 MBA negotiations. Writers took a strike authorization vote that year, in part because the AMPTP proposed inadequate additional funding in exchange for automatic cuts to the plan if funding dipped below a certain level—meaning when the Health Fund has a problem, writers must pay for it outside of bargaining with no chance of additional employer funding. In 2017, we won a 2% increase in the contribution rate, and agreed to plan changes that lowered the Health Fund’s costs by reducing what the plan paid for visits to out-of-network providers. The willingness of members to authorize collective action if necessary achieved our goal: the plan was sufficiently funded and writers could focus our power in the next few negotiations on other major issues.

Amid this contraction, our employers are steadily building their profits in streaming. Across their entertainment businesses, they are projected to take in $25 billion in combined operating profits in 2025. While writers can help address part of the deficit through plan changes, the contraction — along with the companies’ refusal to make a fair deal for 148 days in 2023 — has created these conditions of particular stress on the fund. Our employers can pay for what we demand to keep the health fund solvent.

What about our pension plan?

Our Pension Plan does not face the same immediate pressure as our health plan. While the Health Fund is primarily funded by employer contributions, the Pension Plan depends on investment income in order to guarantee benefits to members 30+ years into the future. Still, we must also seek additional pension funding in 2026 to maintain the Pension Plan for today’s working writer and tomorrow’s retirees.

How the Pension Plan Works

WGA members first won pension benefits in 1960, following a nearly five-month strike. Our plan is a defined-benefit pension. Employers make required contributions to the fund on the basis of our earnings under the MBA. Once a writer vests in the pension by earning $5,000 in each of five years, upon retirement they are promised a monthly payout based on career earnings for the rest of their life.

As a result of ongoing systematic attacks from Republicans and large corporations over many decades, a small number of American workers have defined benefit pensions. WGA’s is the best defined-benefit pension among the unions in our industry.

In order to pay out these benefits, the Pension Plan relies both on employer contributions and investment returns. Employers currently make contributions of 11.25% of earnings to the Pension Plan up to certain caps. Similar to the Health Fund, employers make pension contributions only on the first $225,000 in earnings for a given screen project, and $275,000 per year for writers on overall deals. Employer contributions to the pension totaled about $179 million in 2025. At the end of 2025, the Pension Plan was valued at about $4.8 billion, representing the contributions on decades of writer earnings plus accumulated investment income.

After the 2008 financial crisis, WGA negotiated increased employer contributions to protect the Pension Plan. And amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we again negotiated increased funding, a 2.75% increase in the pension contribution rate over the term of the MBA—some diverted from minimums, which has increased the plan’s funding. Our plan is currently healthy as a result of these prior efforts to increase funding along with careful stewardship of the plan’s investments. As of the end of 2025, the pension plan is 90% funded, meaning that it could pay out 90% of all the pension benefits it currently owes using only the cash and assets on hand.

In this period where our pension plan remains healthy, we need to increase contributions to protect against the impact of the next financial downturn or period of market instability. While the Pension Plan is designed to pay out benefits over many decades, federal legislation mandates a short-term focus on investment returns that can threaten our benefits.

In 2006, Congress passed the Pension Protection Act (PPA), which added new requirements for defined benefit pensions that could force them to make changes quickly in response to short-term investment changes. Due to this law, and lingering effects of the 2008 market crash, a single bad year for our plan’s investments could force us to make benefit cuts. If a downturn happens in the middle of a contract, we have almost no chance of getting higher contributions from the companies.

While the plan’s assets are carefully invested, we are subject to fluctuations in the stock market and the current federal government is not interested in trying to stabilize markets. As a result, we need to secure additional funding from our employers now.

The industry is transitioning to a streaming-dominant business and our health fund needs additional funding because of the disruption the media companies have caused. All the while, employers are taking in billions in profits. As we enter another contract negotiation, it’s time to use our collective power to protect the core benefits of healthcare and pension.