Pension and Health

One of the key benefits of membership in the Screen Actors Guild is its Pension & Health plan, what’s known in the business as a multi-employer plan, because members can earn credit in the plan when they work under union contracts regardless of the employer. Whether you’re doing a commercial for an agency or a movie for a studio, the pension and health insurance credit is generated on your behalf to the same fund. The plan is administered as an independent entity by a board of trustees comprised half of union and half management representatives. The union trustees are elected by the SAG National Board of Directors and can be fired by that board.

AFTRA also maintains a multi-employer plan, called the AFTRA Health & Retirement Fund. Actors Equity has its own, independent plan. One of the important sources of friction between the unions and unhappiness among members is that because perfomers often work within a single year in the jurisdiction of two or more unions, their pension and health credits are split up among the plans - and this can mean that a performer doesn’t reach minimum qualifying levels in any one plan, thus going without health insurance or pension credit, even though they’re doing a considerable amount of union covered work.

The plans have also become the subject of considerable disagreement in the conflict between Membership First and AFTRA. Membership First has correctly noted that the AFTRA Pension Plan has a lower accrual rate than SAG’s Pension Plan. AFTRA has correctly pointed out that SAG’s plan requires double the earnings to even qualify for a pension.

There’s some room for optimism in this area, though. Membership First and AFTRA seem to agree that the Health and Pension plans should be merged, which makes sense, since now the plans are paying for duplicate lawyers, accountants, and adminsitrative people, to the tune of millions of dollars a year.

The catch in this is that management has half the votes in each plan, and has historically resisted merger, to the point of one SAG Plan management trustee claiming that an outside consultant’s report prepared in 2002-2003, known as the Mercer Report, showed that it would not be in the interest of participants for the plans to be merged. SAG’s union side trustees, who had read the same report, responded that the report’s headline was that there were no obstacles to merger.