SAG dissidents cry foul over ‘special bulletin’
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No Screen Actors Guild election would be complete without controversy, as evidenced in the latest drama inside Hollywood’s most discordant union.
Next week, nearly one-third of SAG’s 71 national board seats will be up for grabs when votes are tabulated in an election that could change the course of the union — and, perhaps, revive stalled contract negotiations with the studios. The challengers are unhappy with the guild’s leaders and have accused them of mishandling the contract talks, which have left actors working without a contract for more than two months.
But even before ballots have been counted, the dissidents in the dominant Hollywood division are fuming over the timing of a ‘special bulletin’ entitled ‘Your Negotiating Committee Fights on to Achieve a Fair Contract.’
The bulletin was recently mailed to the guild’s 120,000 members at an estimated cost of more than $100,000. The 12-page report went far beyond the typical contract update and included a point-by-point critique of the studios’ offer. It warned that the studios were seeking to ‘take away many of the protections the union has fought so hard for’ while denying even the union’s most modest proposals, like a 10-cent increase in the mileage rate for actors, which has remained unchanged since 1980.
The mailer also included response cards asking members to advise the negotiating committee on whether to accept the studios’ offer as is or continue negotiating to secure a better deal.
For the dissidents, the mailer felt more like SAG-financed campaign literature than a straight-up report on the talks.
Ned Vaughn, a board candidate and spokesman for ‘Unite for Strength,’ which is running a slate of candidates to fill open Hollywood division seats, questioned why the mailer was sent out in the middle of a board election, rather than, say, in early July just after contract negotiations sputtered.
‘A contract update mailer that contains so little updated information but so clearly casts the current leadership in a positive light is suspect,’ Vaughn said.
Vaughn and his group, which counts Tom Hanks, Sally Field and Alec Baldwin among its celebrity backers, have blasted SAG leaders over their negotiating strategy and warring with the smaller actors union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. They’re squaring off against Membership First, the faction that holds a slim majority over the SAG board and dominates the union’s negotiating committee. Its celebrity supporters include Sean Penn and Martin Sheen -- not to mention SAG President Alan Rosenberg.
Hollywood dissidents and New York board members also have questioned why the response cards contain bar codes that would allow SAG to identify how individual members voted, violating a longstanding tradition of anonymous voting.
‘Frankly, had this been disclosed, I don’t know the board would have agreed to it,’ said former SAG President and national board member Richard Masur. (Masur has been a vocal critic of the Rosenberg camp.)
New York board members, who’ve repeatedly clashed with SAG Executive Director Doug Allen, were so incensed last week that they demanded SAG declare the poll null and void. That didn’t happen.
A spokesperson said Wednesday that Allen was tied up in meetings and unavailable to talk. But in a letter to the board posted earlier this week on SAG’s website, he stated that the poll was simply intended to sample member views on the studios’ proposals and contract negotiations. The bar code, he added, is aimed at preventing fraud and to permit a ‘demographic analysis of the response to determine how representative the response is.’
Allen said that he had instructed the company tabulating the results to ‘make sure that the name of any responding member is to be kept confidential and is not to be used for any purpose.’
Negotiating committee member George Coe called criticisms of the mailer ‘ridiculous’ and said the purpose of the mail card was solely to help guide the negotiating committee. Besides, he added, most members probably cast their votes for the board before receiving the mailer anyway. ‘If the timing was based on winning the election, this would have been sent out two months ago,’ he said.
-- Richard Verrier
