4-11-08
AFTRA Ends Phase 1
Upcoming Film/TV Negotiations to be Separate
It’s either a bold move from a union fighting for its life in the face of another union’s aggressive incursions, or it’s a manipulative move by a union that has been planning for years to compete with its bigger rival, and finally saw its chance. However you see it, the facts remain the same: the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) has ended its Phase 1 agreement with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). That means the two unions will negotiate with film and television producers separately. And, oddly, leaders of both unions agree that the move will have the same short-term ramifications: It will hurt actors.
The move came less than two weeks ago, on the eve of a joint board meeting to ratify bargaining proposals which the two unions had been working out for weeks. They were set to go into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which has been on a marathon negotiating schedule with writers and directors since last fall. But the night before the meeting, the AFTRA board was told of a meeting SAG executive director Doug Allan and SAG president Alan Rosenberg had with representatives of the cast of “The Bold and the Beautiful”—a soap opera, and therefore represented by AFTRA. The AFTRA board saw this as a raiding move—a signal that SAG means to wage a nasty war against its sister union.
“We’ve been painfully aware for almost a year that a raid was being developed by the Screen Actors Guild,” said AFTRA president Roberta Reardon.
But Reardon also admits that the AFTRA leadership had learned about the meeting a couple of weeks before they decided to end Phase 1. Why would they not address the issue with their board then? Why wait two weeks for the joint wages and working conditions committee to hammer out a negotiating strategy for the film and TV talks?
Reardon said they were trying to talk to the cast of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and they didn’t want to make any rash moves. The cast, led by actress Susan Flannery, was circulating a petition that would be the first step in decertifying itself from AFTRA. Reardon said the phrase going around amongst the cast was “‘switch your contract,’ which sounds much more benign” than “decertify.”
But a cast can’t easily decertify, or switch unions. To discourage raiding, the AFL-CIO—of which SAG and AFTRA are both members—have rules and waiting periods when it comes to changing unions. If “The Bold and the Beautiful” cast wanted to change unions, it would have taken anywhere from two to five years—during which they would be represented by no unions at all.
The cast didn’t seem to know that. Even more remarkable, it seems that neither Rosenberg nor Allen, who is a labor lawyer, told the two cast members they had lunch with about the AFL-CIO rules. Rosenberg now admits that he didn’t know there was a waiting period when he talked to the cast members. But, he doesn’t apologize for talking, though he denies that he and Allen were staging a raid.
“It’s good for me to collect information about people who are unhappy with their AFTRA representation,” said Rosenberg. He said he has had lots of conversations with working basic cable TV actors who are not happy with AFTRA’s contract. He’s visited the sets of “Army Wives” and “Kyle XY,” which both operate with what Rosenberg calls overly generous free play days for producers.
“These are actors who were in tears when they realized they were giving away their residuals,” Rosenberg said.
He said his sole motivation for talking to actors working AFTRA contracts was to put pressure on AFTRA to negotiate the basic cable contract with SAG. Currently, both unions negotiate them separately, though they are technically part of the Phase 1 agreement. And, SAG has been complaining for some time that AFTRA’s generous deals are meant to undercut SAG.
Ironically, it is SAG that has been threatening to end Phase 1 over the issues of basic cable and proportional representation. But the Screen Actors Guild backed down, seeing what Rosenberg said was the wisdom of facing the TV and movie producers as one group.
That’s what he finds so astonishing about the move by AFTRA.
“After spending six weeks with us in the W&W process that was really collaborative and moving…at the last minute, the leadership does this?” Rosenberg said. “They take that now and are going to use it as their proposal and diminish our strength. It is inexcusable.”
But Reardon said it wasn’t that simple, or that easy.
“Very few people [on the board] wanted to pull the plug on this. [But] everybody understood that the central tenet of bargaining is trust.
“This is not about ‘The Bold and the Beautiful.’ [They were] the catalyst,” Reardon said. “This is about a year-long move by SAG to raid our union.”
She points to an article Allen wrote in Working Actor Magazine last fall, detailing the differences between SAG and AFTRA’s basic cable agreements, and pension and health plans. Allen and Rosenberg said the article put out facts their members needed to know. Reardon said the article was misleading, and was meant to scare actors. “The Bold and the Beautiful” cast, she said, was complaining about foreign residual ceilings (which Reardon said the show has not exceeded) and health care caps, which affect actors in California to the benefit of Screen Actors Guild members. But other than that, she asserts, the talk among the cast was about basic cable—a contract that has nothing to do with soap operas.
PerformInk’s attempts to get ahold of Flannery went unanswered.
John Carter Brown concedes that “The Bold and the Beautiful” cast was misinformed, and that Allen and Rosenberg used “bad judgment” in holding a two-hour lunch with two cast members. But he sees the catalyst argument as dubious. Chicago’s SAG national board representative finds himself in the minority of Chicago SAG actor opinion. A former AFTRA national board member, Brown feels that after 10 years of failed merger talks and ongoing disagreements, AFTRA has put in place a plan to overthrow, or at least undermine, the SAG leadership that has derailed attempts to work together.
“The deliberateness with which they timed this story and the release of this story, so it hit everybody’s doorstep on the eve of the joint board meeting—this was very manipulative on the part of the people at the top of AFTRA,” Brown said.
He thinks that AFTRA’s move was intended to force SAG to fire executive director Allen and elect a new board—an assertion which Reardon does not necessarily deny. She said she’s been encouraging like-minded SAG Hollywood actors to run for the L.A. or national boards for some time. And, she pointed out that “the commercials contract, interestingly, comes after the fall elections for the Screen Actors Guild.”
But, Brown points out, the first board meeting after next fall’s election, is Oct. 19—11 days before negotiations begin for the commercials contract.
“You can’t, 11 days before the end of a contract, dump your lead negotiator,” Brown asserted. AFTRA’s strategy, he said, is “manipulative and it’s not well thought out.
“This stuff hurts Chicago—it hits us to the core on our commercials and our strength in commercial negotiations,” he added.
But as SAG and AFTRA have demonstrated, anything can happen in six months, and right now the focus is on the TV and film production contracts. SAG is scheduled to meet with the AMPTP first, starting April 15, largely because insurance companies are threatening to not issue completion bonds for films after mid-April. AFTRA has scheduled their negotiations—which only cover primetime television—for the end of April, in the hopes that SAG will be done, or the AMPTP will want to take a break from SAG negotiations
That is what worries Rosenberg and Brown.
“If there’s another entity out there that’s willing to settle for less,” said Rosenberg, “it’s going to increase [the AMPTP’s] leverage.”
Yet both unions went through W&W together, and seemed to be on the same page before the break. And both Reardon and Rosenberg point out that actors can’t make the same deal as writers. There are vastly more actors, who all have to deal with the issue of overexposure—which is not an issue for writers and directors.
“There is every chance we could end up with similar contracts depending on how this shakes out,” Reardon said.
Meanwhile, she is hoping that the break will help actors see clearly that SAG has been bullying its sister union, and blaming AFTRA for all of the ills befalling above-the-line talent.
“The SAG leadership will have to own their actions—they have gotten a free pass,” Reardon said. “I’m tired of being a scapegoat for the Guild not being able to handle their own issues.
“The level of mistrust [of SAG] outside of Hollywood is intense and I’m willing to bet that that level of mistrust is beginning to grow inside of Hollywood,” she added. “We’re going to keep telling the truth and we’re going to keep telling the truth without having to run it through a SAG filter.”
She concedes that it’s a gamble—but she sees it as one AFTRA had to take.
“We may lose, but we weren’t winning anyway. We were slowly being taken apart. We couldn’t get our own message out.”
Reardon is hoping that in the long term, AFTRA’s message—which already is heard by New York and regional SAG actors—will resonate with more Hollywood actors. But, she concedes, the termination of Phase 1 will not be good for anyone.
“In the short term we’re probably all going to lose something.”
Previous stories on this issue:
AFTRA/SAG Agree to Talk to Producers Together
SAG Steps Back to Make Deal with AFTRA
SAG to Hold Referendum on Phase 1
Jurisdictional Disputes Threaten to Break AFTRA/SAG Alliance