HOLLYWOOD, Calif. —With its leaders reporting great progress in their talks, the board of SAG-AFTRA deferred a potential forced strike against movie and TV studios, streaming video firms, and similar enterprises until mid-day July 13.
That’s when the board will meet to decide to implement the strike by some 65,000 artists, which had been scheduled to begin July 1. Instead, talks continue through at least July 12, with the board scheduled to meet the following day to decide whether to call a strike. Months ago, the whole union voted by a 98%-2% margin to authorize the board to call a strike.
Union President Fran Drescher and executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said on June 27 that bargainers’ talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP)—which represents the studios and the other firms—were “extremely productive” so far. Then they announced the delay. They also told members to toil under the current contract.
But Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland did not specify, at least publicly, how productive the talks have been, and in what areas. And that upset some 300 members of the union, including some of its most prominent, such as multiple award-winner Meryl Streep and her colleague Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
In a sharp letter to Drescher, Crabtree-Ireland, and other bargainers, the 300 said the rank-and-file members they surveyed are much more willing to hold out for maximum gains in a contract that comes at “a point of inflection” for the entire entertainment industry.
“SAG-AFTRA members may be ready to make sacrifices that leadership is not,” Streep and the others said. “We feel that our wages, our craft, our creative freedom, and the power of our union have all been undermined in the last decade. We need to reverse those trajectories.”
Key bones of contention between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP are pay which lags inflation by multiple percentage points, and shorter shooting schedules, which also cut pay. Others are the virtual disappearance of residuals, which give actors a cut of the proceeds whenever one of their films or shows is rerun and the studios’ and videos’ increasing reliance on artificial intelligence as a computer-generated substitute for real people.
The studios are also forcing performers into self-taped auditions, depriving other less-prominent and lower-paid SAG-AFTRA members of jobs.
Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland took some note of members’ restiveness. In announcing the extension of the talks, which all take place while the current and inadequate contract remains in force, the two said to their members, “We see you! We hear you! We are you!”
“No one should mistake this extension for weakness,” they added.
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