US: AFTRA capitulates to the studios and networks, the pressure is on SAG

The studios and networks have pursued the same strategy in regard to performers as they did with the writers and directors contracts over the winter: make a deal with the union bureaucracy most eager to capitulate and then pressure the somewhat more reluctant one to agree to approximately the same terms. In the case of the directors and writers, the conglomerates signed a rotten deal with the Directors Guild (DGA), which the companies, along with the media, presented as a model that the Writers Guild (WGA) eventually accepted.

AFTRA, with 70,000 members, represents announcers, musicians, soap opera, cable TV and reality TV actors, actors in a limited number of commercials and industrial/educational films, as well as in some scripted primetime shows. Some 70 percent of daytime television performers belong to AFTRA.

Forty-four thousand of its members also belong to the 122,000-strong Screen Actors Guild (SAG), with whom the employers now plan to deal. SAG covers most film and prime time television actors. It has generally been considered the more combative of the two organizations. The SAG contract expires June 30.

The deal reached Wednesday apparently concludes three weeks of negotiations in which AFTRA went to the table without SAG as its negotiating partner for the first time in decades. The new agreement, apparently based on what the WGA obtained after three months on the picket line, places enormous pressure on SAG to capitulate to the demands of the conglomerates.

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