September 11, 2008 by Editor.

With the SAG elections entering their final week, an atmosphere of sullen, nervous anticipation seems to have gripped the usual suspects. Membership First seems to be preparing its followers for a substantial loss, complaining about everything from Unite for Strength’s financing to their well organized effort to remind members to vote.

Blogstage has closing summations from the two sides.

Things we haven’t heard anything about recently include the TV-Theatrical negotiations. Remember, “your committee is working for you every day?” We haven’t heard about any activity - not even a spurious claim of back channel talks - for more than a week.

We also haven’t heard any response to the push poll trojan bungling - with duplicate postcards being sent to some members, none to others. Perhaps belatedly worrying about accusations of using union resources to prop up the incumbents, the SAG website hasn’t been updated in almost a week. Then again, given the problems with the overbudget site, perhaps there’s a less political explanation.

Today we’ve seen John McCain and Barak Obama put aside partisan politics at least for a few hours. There’s even been a suprising trend towards that in our comment section.

Nice. An exchange of ideas. Also feel free to use http:/’/bbs.sagwatch.net

Posted in SAG Politics, Exhibit A - TV Theatrical | Print | 16 Comments »

September 11, 2008 by Editor.

It wasn’t the most newsy of interviews, but here’s what we took out of the hour plus interview with AFTRA NED Kim Hedgpeth conducted by Jonathan Handel yesterday.

Commercials Contract
Hedgpeth said AFTRA’s Strategy Cabinet has recommended to the National Board that it request the AFL-CIO work with SAG and AFTRA to develop a way to jointly negotiate the commercials contract. (The AFTRA National Board next meets in early October.)

Merger
Hedgpeth said the most recent policy statement from the AFTRA Convention, which is AFTRA’s highest governing body, is pro merger. But she said what will actually be done about merger is “up to the will of the membership,” which sounded a lot like “don’t hold your breath.”

Hedgpeth also said AFTRA is not going to merge with IATSE. “We’re happy to have a strategic alliance with the IATSE, we have a lot of common areas but we are not looking to merge.”

The “Undercutting” Claim
Hedgpeth responded with a flat denial of the Membership First claim that AFTRA’s basic cable contracts are designed to undercut SAG to win market share.

“This is not an issue of zero sum game between the unions,” Hedgpeth said. “This is an issue of how unions whether AFTRA, or any other union, does what its members charge it to do which is to negotiate better wages, better working conditions and to make sure non union areas are organized to make for greater opportunities to the greatest extent possible.”

Asked about exhibition windows in cable contracts, Hedgpeth went into much more detail than Handel expected (something that appeared to happen several times. Handel would ask a question, and Hedgpeth would give a highly detailed answer, something that appeared to frustrate Handel on occasion.)

“It’s not a matter of offering free runs,” she said. “Historically when Basic Cable was first being organized the original structure was taken from pay television and in the pay television arena in both performers unions the pay terlevision structure has an exhibition window.”

She went on to explain that there are actually three possible structures used by the WGA, DGA and AFTRA in basic cable, the pay TV formula, the Sanchez formula or freely negotiated residual rates. Which specific structure is used is on any given show or shows amounts to “budget based questions that are looked at based on whether they are low budget or high budget programs.”

TV-Theatrical - Exhibit A
Handel spent a considerable amount of time on the TV-Theatrical and Exhibit A negotiations. Hedgpeth defended Exhibit A as a major advance for performers, and rejected the idea that AFTRA should have deferred to SAG in the negotiations, saying AFTRA members set as a key priority improvements to scale and rates, and that’s what the negotiating committee delivered.

“This is a significant improvement in the ways that affect the most members in the most important ways,” Hedgpeth said, noting that the contract contained improvements only and no rollbacks. “Our [negotiating] committee was not presupposing what others would choose for their issues and options.”

Non Derivative New Media
On the non professional non derivative new media loophole criticized by Membership First as violating SAG’s “core principles,” Hedgpeth defended the new Exhibit A language as an improvement over the previous language which did not guarantee any new media jurisdiction to either SAG or AFTRA.

The sunset clause is not just a fig leaf, she said, “I think the negotiating committee looked at it and looked at the kind of product you’d be talking about and what the group of professionals in the union that are needed, that that exception would be such a small and narrow exception during this interim period.”

Gains in traditional media, Hedgpeth said, were far more important, and she noted the AFTRA contract carried across the board raises, some of which were substantial.

On SAG’s continuing negotiations on TV-Theatrical, Hedgpeth said she wishes SAG success, because “a victory for any union is a victory for all unions. We certainly hope they are successful in their negotiations.”

–
All in all, Handel’s interview didn’t really move the ball much. Handel couched many of his questions in easily dismissible rhetoric, and Hedgpeth easily batted them aside. When he asked a question about a Membership First claim, Hedgpeth actually answered it, in occasionally excruciating detail.

She didn’t offer much of an answer to the question of why AFTRA hasn’t succeeded in organizing CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel, and Handel didn’t follow up, presumably because he wanted to get to his SAG/AFTRA questions. Handel waited until the end of the interview to really dig into that, and quickly ran out of time.

Posted in Commercials Contract, Exhibit A - TV Theatrical, SAG-AFTRA | Print | 36 Comments »