The WGA East is urging the Nonfiction Producers Association to come to the bargaining table this month to hammer out an industrywide contract for writers and producers of TV reality shows. In an open letter to the year-old trade association, the guild said collective bargaining is the only way to ensure fair wages and working conditions for industry workers and to prevent individual companies from overworking and underpaying their employees in order to undercut the competition.

The invitation to meet comes just days after Rick Feldman stepped down as the NPA’s first executive director, having spurned guild leaders’ requests to meet. “We asked them to meet when they formed last year, and they never responded,” said WGA East executive director Lowell Peterson. “Now that they’re in a transitional period, this would be a good time for them to sit down with us. We know the areas that writer-producers are interested in improving, which are exactly the same areas that the association says it wants to improve. So let’s meet. Let’s talk.”

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Here’s the guild’s open letter to the NPA: