'Vote No' Website Is Launched

Keri Tombazian, a SAG and AFTRA member who was on the guild's 2003 commercials negotiating committee, has launched a new website, SAGDecision.com, urging the rank and file to vote no on strike authorization.

The site is standard: blog postings and links to articles about the negotiations. It also outlines five reasons why actors should vote no; chief among them, Tombazian told Strike Watch, is that a vote for strike authorization is a vote for strike.

"Strike authorization, in this case, is a misnomer," she said. "It is a vote for strike."

SAG leaders have strenuously objected to that characterization, saying strike authority is a tool that will give negotiators more leverage at the table. It is not, they say, an inevitable and inexorable move to the picket line.

"It may be nice for those who oppose strike authorization to spin and distribute [that notion] because it encourages fear, but it is not true," said Anne-Marie Johnson, SAG's first vice president and spokeswoman for Membership First, the one-time majority party that still controls the negotiating committee. "Strike authorization is to inform the CEOs that our union is prepared to do whatever it takes ... to get the CEOs to the negotiating table. If that fails, if the CEOs believe they can continue strong-arming unions without negotiating in good faith, then that information goes back to the national board for vetting. The ultimate decision is made by the national board. And I don't have to remind anybody about the moderate makeup of the national board."

Membership First holds 35 of 55 seats in the Hollywood Division of SAG and once held a small majority on the national board. After the September elections, Unite for Strength, a Hollywood-based group that favors merger with AFTRA, joined with board members in the New York and Regional Branch divisions to give moderates a slim majority.

Although prominent members such as Mike Farrell, Rhea Pearlman, and Danny DeVito have spoken out recently against strike authorization, Tombazian's site is the latest to provide a central gathering point for those who oppose giving the guild's national board the power to stage a walkout. SAGWatch.net was started earlier this year, and its editors seem squarely in the same camp--that is, against, the current SAG leadership and Membership First. SAGWatchDog.com is much more sympathetic to MF views, but it is run by Arlin Miller, an actor who is determinedly independent.

Tombazian's site began as a series of emails she would send to fellow members and her list grew over the past several years. This year, as momentum seemed to be building toward a strike, Tombazian thought she would take an ad out in the trades to make her point, but soon discovered that was financially impossible. The website, then, "was the only way to go."

Tombazian first became involved with union politics during the 2000 commercials strike. Several well-known commercial actors, fearful of losing their big accounts, considered the idea of adopting financial-core status--meaning they would pay only the minimum dues required to work union contracts while obtaining the right to work non-union jobs. Tombazian said she was part of a group that went to recording studios to persuade them not to change their status. "We successfully stopped a fair amount," she said.

The six-month commercials strike of 2000, the longest in guild history, is the seminal moment in the current divide within the performers' unions. Prominent members of AFTRA, as well as those in the New York and Regional Branch divisions of SAG, have described it as unsuccessful for many actors, particularly those who, like Tombazian, primarily do radio and voiceover spots. Others say the strike was very effective, because it generated huge increases in actors' pay for basic-cable spots.

Tombazian does not believe the strike was ineffectual, but she does have mixed feelings about it. "It activated a lot of members to get involved," she said. "That was a very positive thing. The rise in pay was another. But the money that we lost in those six months? We can't make up that money."

Tombazian hosts a show on a smooth jazz station, KTWV 94.7, in Los Angeles, but said she makes most of her income from doing voiceovers on the SAG and AFTRA commercials contracts. Although she has not worked the TV/Theatrical contract as much, she said it has a significant impact on her career.

"It affects everything," she said, "not only because of the pattern that it sets, but because how the health of the industry is. ... I don't have one big show. I have many little accounts. And if they all just start to go away, I'm screwed."

Johnson countered that the failure to get strike authorization would have wide-ranging effects as well. "If we don't achieve a strike authorization in this contract," she said, "we will not achieve strike authorization in the commercial negotiations, the basic-cable negotiations, or any other contract that follows."

On the whole, Tombazian laments that something such as strike authorization, which typically is a pro forma piece of business, has become as politically freighted as anything else in the guild. "When a contract negotiation ws coming up, you got your negotiating committee together and you got your strike authorization," she said. "It didn't become this political football, and now it is. And that to me is what has clouded the judgment of so many people."

--Andrew Salomon