Some three years after a labor dispute resulted in picket lines outside Tyler Perry Studios, the Writers Guild of America, East announced that it has reached a collective bargaining agreement covering the company's TBS television show, "House of Payne."
The show employs seven staff writers, who under the new pact will see their weekly minimum salaries rise 15 percent.
The minimum payments writers receive for scripts will go up 20 percent, as will residual payments, the guild said.
“Members, living and working in the important cultural hub of Atlanta, write some of the funniest work on television,” WGAE executive director Lowell Peterson, who was the union’s chief negotiator, said in a statement. “We are pleased that their contributions are being recognized, and we look forward to a continued productive relationship with Tyler Perry Studios.”
Perry publicly sparred with the labor union in 2008. The production company got into hot water with the labor community after it fired four writers for "House of Payne" who were seeking union representation.
After the guild staged demonstrations outside the actor's Atlanta office, the company relented and allowed its writers to unionize.
