October 2, 2008 by admin.

The comment is far from full and forthcoming, but what we have from Unite for Strength comes via BlogStage and Andrew Salomon:”The matter of a strike authorization is now in the hands of the national board and that’s where it will be dealt with,” Vaughn wrote in an email. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on it further at this time.”

Posted in SAG Politics, Exhibit A - TV Theatrical | Print | 32 Comments »

October 2, 2008 by WW.

And maybe a giggle.

Andrew Salomon’s noticed that Membership First’s TV-Theatrical strike authorization request may involve more political gamesmanship than anything else. Well, duh.

But he’s also noticed that Unite for Strength has been utterly silent about it. For what’s becoming a really long time.This may have something to do with being painted into a political corner - which may make for good faction politics, but isn’t so great for union members.  Jonathan Handel, posting only minutes after Salomon, has some ideas on that, including a suggestion raised by our own Voiceguy that the National Board simply toss the decision back to the negotiating committee.

The downside of that, of course, is that the Membership First dominated committee could very easily decide to seek the strike authorization, even though conventional wisdom is that it would very likely fail to win the 75% support necessary to pass.

Oh…and Salomon is also running a little poll on whether we’d accept or reject the AMPTP’s “last, best and final” offer. If it were scientific, it might be a proxy for a strike authorization vote.But it’s not. 

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October 2, 2008 by Editor.

The economy is in panic mode. The TV-Theatrical deal still isn’t done.

The commercials contract has extended twice, this latest time for just six months. The JPC says they intend to negotiate once, not twice.

Here’s what will have to pass for the good news. We’re hearing that the AFL-CIO responded favorably to the joint SAG and AFTRA request for what were described as “facilitated conversations” in order to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, at least for long enough to jointly negotiate the commercials contract.

We’re also hearing those conversations, over the past weeks, have been productive, with the leaders of both unions recognizing the importance of getting this deal done. Jointly hosted information sessions have already been scheduled. The question has been how to accomplish the larger goal.

AFTRA’s board meets Saturday. SAG’s board meets in two weeks.

We’re expecting the results of those “facilitated conversations” to be a major agenda item for both unions… though the SAG board will be struggling with the TV-Theatrical strike authorization issue, too.

Now the bad news. The “education” sessions aren’t likely to be pretty. A lot of the information, including the Booz Allen study, is going to be extremely pessimistic - stuff no one wants to hear.

Even before the economic meltdown the commercials landscape was changing rapidly, with technology fueling a breakdown of many traditional agency/production parameters. It hasn’t become better, even if SAG and AFTRA manage to get a Phase 1-like structure together in order to put our best collective foot forward.

This negotiation promises to be much more difficult than TV-Theatrical.

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October 2, 2008 by Editor.

We hadn’t noticed, until Membership First’s Frances Fisher quoted from it in a blog post elsewhere - but the Allens have rewritten the “history” of SAG once again, and have done so in a bizarre and erratic fashion. The apparently rushed rewrite has been posted on the SAG website, complete with strange references and obvious errors such as repeated entries.

Since they’ll probably fix it shortly after this post, we’re linking to this copy, made today.

Here’s what we found particularly striking in what we call “The History of SAG, According to the Allens.”

Repeated references to 1930s era corruption in IATSE.

At the end of 1999 they were counting the ballots on SAG-AFTRA merger. (The vote totals were announced Jan. 28, 1999.) 

On May 1, 2002, Kevin Spacey supported the enforcement of Global Rule 1.

Nothing happened between April 2004 and the 2007 hiring of Doug Allen.

Nothing has happened since Doug Allen was hired on Jan. 8, 2007.

Also, we’ve noticed the disappearance of any SAG statements relating to the July 2003 results of the “consolidation” vote, in which approximately 58% of SAG voted in favor of merging SAG and AFTRA. They’re just gone.

Posted in SAG Politics, Exhibit A - TV Theatrical | Print | 1 Comment »