Richard Verrier at our Company Town blog has the scoop: Negotiators for the Screen Actors Guild and the major studios have reached a tentative deal on a new two year contract. A vote by the union's national board is expected on Sunday. All I can say is -- it's about time cooler heads prevailed!
If you had any doubt about the depth of trouble the Screen Actors Guild is in right now, you only had to pick up Wednesday’s LA Times op-ed page, where Melissa Gilbert, a former SAG president, basically read the riot act to the current SAG administration, calling their upcoming strike authorization vote a "foolhardy move that endangers not only the union, but our entire entertainment industry." While acknowledging that the deal on the table has its flaws, she asked a pertinent question, in light of the fact that unemployment in California is expected to reach 9% next year: "How can any SAG member vote to knowingly put so many people in our industry into further jeopardy during the largest financial crisis since the Depression?"
It’s no secret that SAG is now a guild divided against itself, with a hugely influential group of stars having joined a growing legion of rank-and-file realists who are now firmly aligned against any kind of strike. Living in its own dream world, the SAG leadership is still steaming full speed ahead, Titanic-style, oblivious to all the icebergs in its path, with its plan to send out strike authorization ballots January 2nd. The guild needs a 75% approval by those voting to forge ahead with a strike. However, in her piece, Gilbert revealed just how serious the union’s divisions are by introducing an explosive new phrase into the contentious debate, a phrase that must have sent chills down the spine of SAG president Alan Rosenberg.
Boldly predicting that many working guild members are not only determined to vote against a strike but “will not honor if one is called,” she used the phrase you only hear when a union is starting to splinter—“financial core.” Known in guild parlance as fi-core, it is the way dissenting members give up their guild membership but retain their union protection while opting to work during a strike. The fact that Gilbert even voiced the phrase tells you that Rosenberg and SAG chief negotiator Doug Allen have managed to thoroughly alienate a host of guild stalwarts with their capricious leadership.
After being rocked by a lengthy strike by the WGA earlier this year, no one in Hollywood, from the highest-salaried studio boss to the lowliest office temp, wants to suffer through another work stoppage, especially with studios already having firing hundreds of employees in recent days. Knowing it has been painted into a corner, SAG is going with its one last option—call for a strike vote, hope to win an overwhelming mandate and then, using a strike threat as leverage, try to wrangle a few face-saving concessions from studio negotiators. “Studios Avert SAG Strike: Deal Sweetened With 11th Hour Compromise ” would be the way Variety would headline the pact.
There’s only one problem with SAG’s strategy. It’s increasingly unlikely that it will get a 75% vote, much less an impressive majority. And even if it does, the studios won’t play ball. Infuriated by the guild leadership’s refusal to accept a deal every other union took earlier this year, buffeted by all sorts of bad economic news and worried that DVD sales will continue to crater in the coming months, the studios aren’t planning to do any more negotiating. Rightly or wrongly, the deal they put on the table isn’t getting any better. It’s take it or leave it time. The doves in the studio firmament are hoping the guild will toss out its current leadership, paving the way for a more pragmatic team to take control. The hawks simply want to crush the guild like a bug. As Variety recently reported, 20th Century Fox has already acknowledged that it wouldn’t rule out switching its current TV series from SAG to AFTRA contracts, a move Warners said it could make as well. AFTRA has said it wouldn’t participate in such a move, but it was another crystal clear message that the studios plan to play hardball. Using the current economic troubles as a handy excuse, they’d like nothing better than to rollback some of the gains the guilds have made in recent years.
Apparently oblivious to what a bad hand they have in this poker game, SAG is playing into the hard-liner’s hands, threatening to undue many of the impressive gains the Writers Guild achieved during its strike. The WGA didn’t just win some valuable concessions from the studios, it persuaded many industry observers that a show business guild could be a responsible player in the game, flexing its muscles, handily trouncing the studios in the PR battle and sticking up for its members without tossing them all off a cliff. It’s hard to fathom what the SAG leadership’s game plan is right now. To use a metaphor that Doug Allen, a former negotiator for the NFL players association might understand, SAG is like a football team deep in their own territory at the end of the fourth quarter, down a couple of touchdowns, without their best players on the field.
Taking a strike vote in the middle of a deep recession is like tossing a Hail Mary pass on fourth and long. There’s really only one way the game can end and it’s not pretty.
I confess. Like all too many other people in Hollywood, after surviving the Writers Guild's months-long work stoppage, I have a bad case of strike fatigue. When talk turns to the Screen Actors Guild leadership, the protracted negotiations with the studios, or the possibility of strike, my eyes glaze over. This is important stuff, of course, but it has been one long strike season. Luckily, The Times' dynamic duo of Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller have been doing yeoman's work in the past months covering the various permutations of Hollywood's labor strife.
The big news this morning was that members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, an increasingly independent-minded rival union, approved a new three-year prime time TV contract. As Verrier and Eller's front-page story pointed out, the 62.4% approval vote dealt a big blow to SAG, which had spent considerable money and time trying to defeat it. So where does this leave SAG? Is union President Alan Rosenberg, the most militant of all Hollywood labor leaders, up the creek without a paddle? Is there any silver lining for his union? Or will SAG be forced to take a few fig leaves from the studios and surrender without a strike?
Verrier graciously carved out a little time to answer a few of our questions and help frame the big issues that could shape the union's reaction over the next few weeks:
Q: Many people in the industry are interpreting the AFTRA 62.4% ratification vote as a pretty clear defeat for SAG, which spent a lot of time and money trying to persuade AFTRA members to vote down the contract. How do you view what happened? Is SAG a big loser?
Verrier: Clearly, it was a setback for SAG given that the union’s leaders had staked so much on defeating an agreement they viewed as deeply flawed and undermining their own bargaining goals. SAG can draw some comfort from the fact that its campaign succeeded in producing a much lower vote of support than normal, but it’s not clear that result will convince studios to give SAG a better deal.
Q: There's been so much name-calling between AFTRA and SAG over the last few months. What is at the root of the bad blood between the two unions?
Verrier: The unions have been fighting a turf war in cable TV. AFTRA has made huge gains in signing up shows in cable, while SAG has steadily lost share in recent years. SAG accuses the smaller union of poaching its turf by agreeing to lowball contracts. AFTRA says it simply has a better understanding of the cable business and has expanded the number of union jobs. Now the battle is spreading to prime-time TV, where AFTRA is poised to pick up a number of new series as more shows are shot digitally. The danger for SAG is that AFTRA could be the big winner in all of this, eventually emerging as the main television union.
Q: SAG seems a lot more divided than the WGA and is getting a lot less industry support than the WGA at this stage of the negotiations. What's the main reason for that?
Verrier: Before the writers strike, guild leaders worked very hard to unify the union by holding a series of outreach meetings with key groups, including high-level screenwriters and moderate showrunners whose support proved vital to the strike’s effectiveness. While there were disagreements over strategy, guild members mostly kept their dissent private. SAG leaders, on the other hand, never managed to build bridges between Hollywood and New York and, in fact, took actions that served to further divide an already fractious union. The timing is unfortunate for SAG. The three-month writers strike exhausted much of the goodwill that SAG might otherwise have enjoyed.
Q: The biggest question in the industry right now is whether the studios will offer SAG a few face-saving compromises or just wait them out, figuring they don't have enough rank-and-file support to pull off a strike. You've been following this closely for months--what you do you think will happen?
Verrier: My guess is that studios will have to offer some limited improvements to SAG, but the sweeteners will probably not address their biggest demands. SAG will try to keep talks alive to prevent studios from declaring an impasse. The studios will likely hold off taking any drastic action such as lockout until early next month, and will press SAG to put its offer to the members for a vote.
Photo by Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times: SAG National President Alan Rosenberg (far right) salutes a crowd of about 100 rallying SAG members.
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