SAG Plays Waiting Game and Actors Are the Losers

News that the Screen Actors Guild vote on strike authorization has been delayed for at least two weeks was about as well-received as a 12-hour root canal. Ballots had been scheduled to go to members Jan. 2, but now they won’t go out --- if they go out at all --- until after a face-to-face meeting of the national board of directors Jan. 12–13. When will it end, this six-months-and-counting ordeal over a new television-and-film contract? Not anytime soon --- and actors continue to pay the price.

We will sidestep the issue of whether actors should take the current offer from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. There’s a case to be made for each position: a) Every other Hollywood union has accepted similar terms, and SAG isn’t likely to do much better, whether it gets strike authorization or not. It should cut a deal now, restore investor confidence in the entertainment industry, and live to fight another day. b) Once producers establish a position on compensation and jurisdiction for particular media, they tend not to budge from it (DVDs, anyone?). The guild’s history shows that residuals for reruns and the rebroadcast of movies were won through a strike or the credible threat of one, so strike authorization is essential.

What is clear, however, is that SAG members have been undermined by the guild’s delaying tactics and an incoherent message from the beginning. There can be little doubt that the guild’s failure in trying to get the best deal possible for actors started with its ill-advised attacks in the summer of 2007 on its sister union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Guild leaders believed that AFTRA was undermining SAG by offering cheaper contracts to cable TV producers. That may have been a legitimate argument to have at some point but not months before the start of landmark contract negotiations. Those attacks were perfectly representative of the guild’s inability to focus on what truly matters: forging a unified front so that it can better represent the rank and file.

AFTRA played its own part in this mess by backing out of the unions' joint negotiating agreement at the last minute, but SAG was the aggressor in this fight and ultimately has to take responsibility for it. That inevitably brings us to the central issue: No one in SAG's leadership seems to be taking responsibility for the current contract mess: not National Executive Director Doug Allen, not President Alan Rosenberg, not the national board.

Rosenberg and Allen should have conceded defeat back in July after they failed to derail AFTRA’s prime-time broadcast television contract. By not doing so, actors are receiving less money working under the guild’s expired deal (as of press time, the lost wages for SAG actors totaled more than $40 million). Worse for the guild, according to Daily Variety, more pilot producers are choosing to sign with AFTRA even though its terms are currently more expensive. If Rosenberg, Allen, and the hawks on the negotiating committee didn’t get the message in July, they should have received it in September, when moderates took control of the national board.

The moderates have also failed, because they won’t come out and publicly state what they privately want: to accept the AMPTP’s deal, with some slight modification. They won't do that because they are afraid of being branded management toadies in SAG's September elections, when a new president could be chosen. But it’s exactly that type of overly cautious political gamesmanship that loses elections. (John Kerry, anyone?)

The strike authorization ballots should be sent out as soon as possible because at some point someone is going to have to make a decision. As no one among the guild leadership seems willing or able to do that, they might as well let the members decide. And quickly.

-- Backstage Editorial Staff