Hollywood?s two decades of labor peace shattered Thursday night, as movie and television writers declared they would embark on an industrywide strike for the first time since 1988, when both writers and Teamsters walked out. The writers? union said it would inform its members no later than Friday afternoon as to when the strike would begin, according to a person who attended a union gathering Thursday night at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The strike would pit union writers, whose position has been eroded by reality television and galloping technological change, against studios and networks that are backed by big corporate owners like General Electric and News Corp., but are also unsure of the future.
See "Writers Set to Strike, Threatening Hollywood", Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes, The New York Times, November 1, 2007