American movie and television writers voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to end their more than three-month strike against Hollywood studios, TV networks and entertainment companies.

Writers are expected to return to work Wednesday, with new programming expected in about a month, according to officials of the writers' union.

"The strike is over," Writers' Guild of America-West (WGA) President Patric Verrone said. "Our membership has voted and writers can go back to work."

According to Verrone, 92.5 percent of the 3,775 members cast ballots in Los Angeles and New York in favor of ending the 100-day strike. The voting was held simultaneously at the Writers' Guild Theater in Beverly Hills and the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

The WGA board of directors over the weekend unanimously recommended the approval of a draft contract between the union and major studios and set Tuesday's membership vote. A ratification vote on the agreement by the membership will be held in two weeks.

"This was not a strike we wanted, but one we had to conduct in order to win jurisdiction and establish appropriate residuals for writing in new media and on the Internet," Verrone said through a statement released Tuesday evening.

Under the pending three-year contract, residuals for movies and TV shows sold online would be doubled, and the WGA would be given jurisdiction over content created specifically for the Web, above certain budget thresholds.

And like directors, writers would receive a 3.5 percent per year increase in minimum pay rates for television and film work.

WGA members, who were previously not paid for content streamed for free via the Internet, will get a fixed residual payment of 1,200 dollars a year for one-hour webcasts during the first two years of the new contract.

In the third year, writers -- unlike Directors' Guild of America members -- would get residuals equal to 2 percent of any revenue taken in by the program's distributor.

WGA officials said that it was the failure of the Golden Globe Awards last month that brought Hollywood studio chief executives back to the bargaining tables.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which hands out the annual Golden Globe Awards, suffered mightily when the WGA refused to grant the normally glitzy awards show a waiver. HFPA was forced to settle for an hour-long news conference in which the winners were announced.

Los Angeles city officials lauded the end of the strike, which has cost striking writers themselves some 270 million dollars in wages since it began on November 5, and cost other production workers some 470 million dollars.
 
(Xinhua News Agency February 13, 2008)