(AP) LOS ANGELES -- A dozen striking TV workers are demanding their bosses face reality.

The ''America's Next Top Model'' employees contend that their tasks on the series should be classified as writing and earn them the union pay and benefits they're not getting in their real-life drama.

The strike is the latest and most aggressive move in the western branch of Writers Guild of America's two-year effort to unionize reality TV.

Sara Sluke and Kai Bowe, who have been picketing outside the offices of ''America's Next Top Model'' since walking out more than two weeks ago, say they're not claiming to create dialogue for contestants and are eager to dispel that assumption. ''There seems to be this idea that we feed lines to the girls and that we really do manipulate the actual shooting. That is not true at all,'' Sluke said.

Instead, the striking staffers -- whose job titles are show producer or associate show producer, and who collectively are known as ''the story department'' -- are responsible for distilling about 200 hours of raw footage into a cohesive and dramatic episode.

After an outline is drafted, the writers scrutinize the footage and choose ''line by line how to best tell the story and craft it to a 41-minute episode with a beginning, middle and end,'' she said.

That makes them eligible for writers guild representation and benefits they now lack, including health insurance, pensions, wage minimums, residuals and credits, Bowe and Sluke said.

CW, a merger of UPN (which now airs ''America's Next Top Model'') and WB, issued a terse statement: ''We expect these issues to be resolved in the near future, and the show remains on track for its Sept. 20 launch on the CW,'' the network said.

Union efforts to organize reality writers began in 2004 as the booming genre displaced scripted fare. About 1,000 reality writers have signed ''recognition cards'' attesting they want union representation, said Patric M. Verrone, guild president.