AFTRA + SAG = Phase One? Doesn't Quite Add Up

There's confusion over whether AFTRA will resume joint bargaining with SAG in upcoming negotiations for new commercials contracts, which expire Oct. 29.

Roberta Reardon and Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, AFTRA's president and national executive director, sent a letter yesterday to SAG counterparts Alan Rosenberg and Doug Allen. In it, they offered the guild a chance to return to the joint bargaining agreement known as Phase One. If SAG accepts, AFTRA's Strategy Cabinet will make a recommendation to the national board to "affirm the offer."

Reading that, one might assume that if SAG says yes to Phase One, AFTRA leaders will ask their national board, which has final authority over this issue, to say yes as well. However, in a separate letter that Reardon sent yesterday to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, she indicated there were several more hoops to jump through before Phase One was a done deal.

In her letter to Sweeney, Reardon begins by saying that AFTRA is considering filing charges against SAG under Article XX of the AFL-CIO constitution. Article XX, among other things, says that two affiliate unions have to respect each other's jurisdiction and not impugn each other's reputation. AFTRA leaders believe it has a case against SAG, on both fronts: A) over allegations the guild tried to poach jurisdiction for the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful; and B) over the guild's unsuccessful attempts to torpedo AFTRA's TV contract. SAG has denied the former; as to the latter, the guild contends it was educating its own members about the flaws in the AFTRA deal. (About 44,000 SAG members also belong to AFTRA.)

Nevertheless, Reardon tells Sweeney, AFTRA is willing to hold off on charges so that the two unions might return to Phase One--but not until a summit between SAG and AFTRA, monitored by Peter diCicco of the AFL-CIO, takes place. (DiCicco led such talks last winter, but they were suspended so that the two unions might prepare for their TV negotiations. AFTRA then suspended Phase One after the allegations over TBATB surfaced in March.)

The equivocal and provisional tone of Reardon's letter to Sweeney may best be captured in this passage: "AFTRA is prepared to explore the remedial conditions necessary to make it possible for AFTRA to conduct joint bargaining for the commercials contract under Phase One with SAG." The long and short of it is this: AFTRA will not enter into any official negotiating arrangement with SAG unless the AFL-CIO is closely monitoring the situation, because AFTRA doesn't trust SAG.

Outside of that, there is an intense power play going on, which is standard for these two unions. SAG first proposed a return to Phase One when Allen sent a letter to Mathis Dunn, AFTRA's chief negotiator for commercials, on July 9. With yesterday's letters, and by setting conditions, AFTRA is trying to re-frame which union is initiating a return to joint negotiating.

But no one in this long-running battle would let even their appearance of power be usurped, evidenced by the first sentence of Rosenberg and Allen's response to Reardon and Hedgpeth: "Your letter today is unclear as to whether AFTRA has actually accepted [SAG's] unconditional offer to participate in Phase One negotiations of the commercials contract with the JPC." (The JPC is the Joint Policy Committee, the panel of negotiators for advertisers and advertising agencies.)

As for the AFL-CIO talks, Rosenberg and Allen indicated they are amenable, but not as a precondition to returning to Phase One: "We should not wait until October to find out if AFTRA is willing to negotiate the commercials contract jointly."

And, as for the considered Article XX charges, SAG says they are without merit but tells AFTRA to take its best shot: "If you feel otherwise, please feel free to proceed."

No matter how you interpret yesterday's letters, this does not seem like the beginning of a beautifully repaired friendship.