12-5-08
SAG to Ask Members to OK Strike
Alan Rosenberg
The Screen Actors Guild has pulled out the strike card. Film and television makers, represented by the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) won’t budge on SAG’s new media demands. And SAG won’t accept the AMPTP’s latest deal. Even a federal mediator couldn’t bridge the gap. And when the mediator, Juan Carlos Gonzalez, abandoned talks the Saturday before Thanksgiving, SAG announced that it would run an education campaign, followed by a strike authorization vote.
SAG president Alan Rosenberg is quick to point out that a vote does not mean a strike. The authorization merely throws the decision to the national board.
“We have to put bullets in our gun in order to get a deal,” Rosenberg told KTLA television in Los Angeles. “I think the AMPTP has been brazen and asked us for things we can’t agree to because they don’t think we can get a strike authorization.”
The AMPTP is not alone in their assumptions. New York and regional SAG members, including Chicago, have long voiced their opposition to a SAG strike. Many supported the deal that AFTRA did with the producers in July and have made no bones about their opinion that SAG should sign the same deal. At the beginning of the summer, A-List actors like Tom Hanks and George Clooney urged SAG not to take the union on strike. And the SAG national board composition has recently changed. In September, Membership First, which is generally seen as a hardline faction, lost its board majority when a new political faction, Unite for Strength, took control of the Hollywood branch.
SAG needs 75 percent of voters to approve a strike authorization for it to go through. But there is no rule about how many people can vote. If only 10,000 vote, and 7,500 of them approve a strike, then the national board will be able to call a strike for its 120,000 member union.
It’s also unclear what will happen if SAG does get a strike authorization. Rosenberg has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to strike, but that he just doesn’t think the AMPTP is taking the union seriously.
The AMPTP reacted angrily to the news of the strike authorization. In a strongly worded statement on its website, it reasserted that the producers will not make any deal with SAG that is different or better than the deal they signed with directors, writers and AFTRA.
“We are prepared to conclude an agreement with SAG, but we simply do not see any justification for SAG receiving more than we have offered—a deal that is every bit as good as the ones the industry’s other Guilds and Unions have negotiated in far better economic times,” the statement said.
Rosenberg counters that SAG has made their case, but that the producers simply don’t want to listen.
“Directors don’t have the same issues actors do,” he told KTLA. “They don’t worry about the reuse of their images.” That directly impacts the internet, where producers want substantially higher reuse permission without paying extra money. They got this from AFTRA, but SAG argues that how much an actor’s face is out there can, perhaps adversely, affect his career.
There’s also the producers’ demand that actors will not be paid on productions made specifically for new media when the total budget is under $15,000 per minute. Rosenberg has repeatedly asserted that the threshold is too high, and will effectively eliminate actors’ jurisdiction in new media.
But the AFTRA contract did not give up new media residuals. It merely agreed to go slowly. AFTRA got the principle of performer consent for any use of clips on new media. They also agreed to collect and share data on new media transactions, along with a sunset provision on new media agreements, so they can come back to the table in three years with data on new media usage and when and how much union members got paid. They did, however, agree to the $15,000 per minute threshold. For a 30-minute show, that’s a budget of $450,000 per episode. Rosenberg thinks that’s too high.
If SAG does call a strike, Rosenberg and executive director Doug Alan will be putting their union careers on the line. A strike would virtually shut down all film production, and much TV production for existing shows. That would certainly hurt below the line workers, who have not yet recovered from the WGA strike earlier this year. But it also may put pressure on producers, who haven’t been able to backlog shows because of the writers’ strike.
It could also backfire magnificently. Pilot season starts in January, and many producers of those shows might choose to go with AFTRA, so as not to be caught in the SAG drama.
The producers, for their part, are already pointing to SAG as the demon that will ruin the careers of actors and tech people. In their 643-word online statement, they mentioned the word “economy” or “economic” 11 times, with phrases such as, historic “economic distress,” “economic upheaval” and “economically devastating,” bolstering their argument that SAG’s demands are ludicrous given the world economic turmoil.
But while the conglomerates that own major production studios have seen their stock prices go down with everyone else’s, economists have been pointing out that entertainment—with its promise of escape from daily woes—usually does well in recessions. Indeed, in the 1930s, Hollywood saw one of its biggest growth periods.
SAG has not set a date for the strike authorization vote. SAG board members in Chicago speculate that the referendum will likely go out by the end of the year and be due back sometime in January.