Campaign Watch: Unite for Strength’s Ken Howard Blasts Membership First “Fuzzy Math” Push Poll - updated

The e-mail below from Unite for Strength candidate and veteran actor Ken Howard was first reported on Blogstage, where Lauren Horwitch says “it was just a matter of time” before Unite for Strength weighed in on the Allens’ push poll. 

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Fellow SAG members,

You’ve been getting a lot of campaign email, but this is one you really should read because it’s about how your dues are being spent – or rather, misspent. And it’s about some pretty fuzzy math coming from Keith Carradine.

First your dues:  SAG leadership just spent well over $100,000 of our dues on a “special bulletin” describing how bad the AMPTP’s current contract offer is – and then asking us whether they should negotiate better terms. The answer is obvious. Of course they should. So why ask?

Is it because the leadership doubts they can negotiate any improvements?

Or is this just an excuse to use our dues money for a 12-page campaign advertisement praising the leadership for “fighting hard” and trying to persuade us to re-elect Membership First board members (who currently control SAG)? Maybe that’s why the update was timed to arrive in your mailbox during the election and was proposed and approved by board members belonging to Membership First.

But unfortunately for them, the mailer also spotlights exactly why we need to elect new leadership. For over two months we’ve been forced to work under an expired contract, costing us millions of dollars. But despite claiming months ago that they were just “hours away” from a deal, SAG leaders still haven’t negotiated a contract that’s any better than the deal signed by AFTRA in June. The mailer calls that “progress,” but when AFTRA’s deal was being voted on, SAG leaders spent another $100,000+ of our dues money trying to convince us how awful it was.

The last thing we need now is an expensive and meaningless poll asking whether we want to accept what’s on the table “without modification” or hold out for a “fair” deal. As Backstage says, that’s “kind of like asking the kids if they’d rather go out for frosty chocolate milkshakes or stay home and count the ceiling tiles”.

What we DO need from SAG leaders is for them to explain how they’re going to strengthen SAG’s hand in this and future contract negotiations. And one thing’s for sure – more fighting with AFTRA won’t help. I’m running for the SAG Board with the other Unite for Strength candidates because we know that getting the best contracts requires REAL leverage — the kind we’ll get from bringing ALL media performers into one powerful union.

Membership First attacked this obvious solution in a recent email from Keith Carradine, arguing that uniting with AFTRA would weaken SAG by “promoting AFTRA to a full 50/50 partnership.” This flies in the face of simple math: SAG members would make up 82% of a merged union. (For a closer look at the numbers please read the article below from my fellow candidate Ned Vaughn.)

We can’t afford to let emotion drive us to division and weakness any longer.
It’s time for new leadership. Please vote to Unite for Strength.

Respectfully,
Ken Howard

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Update: Variety quotes Membership First’s Anne-Marie Johnson responding to the Howard e-mail:

“I think Ken Howard and Unite for Strength would rather that SAG members not know what’s going on,” said Johnson, who’s also a board member and on the SAG negotiating committee. “First they complain that we’re not doing anything and then they complain that we’re spending too much money trying to educate the members. It sounds as if they’d rather the members get their information by relying only on the AMPTP web site.”

This entry was posted on September 3, 2008 at 18:01 and is filed under SAG Politics, Exhibit A - TV Theatrical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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