by LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thousands of Hollywood actors are on the picket lines after their union and a trade group representing the industry’s top movie and television studios failed to reach an agreement on a new contract.
The national board of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, voted unanimously Thursday morning to go on strike, the union’s chief negotiator announced at an evening news conference.
Pickets will begin to form on Friday, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told SAG-AFTRA reporters.
“What’s happening here matters because what’s happening to us is happening in every field of work, through employers making Wall Street and greed their priority and forgetting about the essential taxpayers that run the machine.” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran. Drescher said.
Unsettled by the streaming-era economics and the rise of unregulated digital technologies, union members are seeking higher base compensation and safeguards around the use of artificial intelligence, among other demands. Hollywood writers are already on strike over similar issues.
In a press release early Thursday, SAG-AFTRA said that after more than four weeks of negotiation, the trade association representing major companies including Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery “remains unwilling to offer a fair dealing on key issues. that are essential” for its members.
Drescher, who starred in the comedy “The Nanny,” said in the statement that his union “bargained in good faith,” but “AMPTP’s responses to the union’s most important proposals have been insulting and disrespectful of our massive contributions to this industry”.
The group representing the studios said it was “deeply disappointed” that an agreement had not been reached.
“This is the Union’s choice, not ours. In doing so, it has scrapped our offer of historic salary and residual increases, substantially higher limits on pension and health contributions, hearing protections, shorter serial option periods, an innovative AI proposition that protects digital images from actors and more”, the Alliance. of Film and Television Producers, he said in a statement.
“Instead of continuing to negotiate, SAG-AFTRA has set us on a course that will deepen the financial hardship of thousands of people who depend on the industry for their livelihoods,” he added.
The strike will be limited to film and television productions. The strike will not involve SAG-AFTRA members who work in the news business, such as certain anchors and announcers.
The announcement comes more than two months ago. after the Writers Guild of America, a union representing film and television writers, began the strike amid its own dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. (The group represents Comcast, the corporation that owns NBCUniversal; some NBCUniversal News Group employees are represented by WGA.)
The writers’ strike halted most television production, delayed filming on some high-profile movies, and sent late-night talk shows to reruns. The actors’ strike will likely force other sets to shut down.
SAG-AFTRA members authorized a strike on June 5 by an overwhelming margin: 97.91% of the nearly 65,000 members who cast their ballots. The union began negotiations with major studios and streaming services two days later.
The union’s existing contract with the major studios originally expired at 11:59 pm PT on June 30, but both sides have agreed to continue negotiations and have extended the talks until midnight on July 12.
SAG-AFTRA has argued that artists have been undermined by the new economy of streaming entertainment and threatened by emerging technologies.
The union is seeking higher base compensation for performers, which union leaders say has declined as early broadcast studios move away from paying waste to talent and inflation takes its toll on the broader economy.
Union actors are also alarmed by the threat posed by the unrelated use of AI (such as tools that can digitally replace recognizable stars) and the cost of “self-recorded auditions,” videos that casting departments used to pay for. and production offices.
In recent weeks, some in the entertainment business have worried that all three of Hollywood’s biggest guilds — SAG-AFTRA, WGA and the Directors Guild of America, or DGA — will walk out of the job simultaneously.
But that won’t be the case as the Directors Guild announced in early June that it had reached a “truly historic” tentative deal with the studios.
