SAG-AFTRA Preparing Picket Signs As Contract Talks Deadline Looms

SAG-AFTRA is making picket indicators within the occasion of a strike subsequent week.

“If a strike becomes necessary, we’re ready,” the guild stated in postings on social media Friday. A strike, if it involves that, could be the actors first towards the movie and TV business since 1980, when pre-merger SAG and AFTRA struck to determine contract phrases for pay-TV and videocassettes. That walkout lasted greater than three months.

Saying that it’s “preparing for a potential TV/theatrical/streaming strike,” SAG-AFTRA despatched out a survey to members this week asking them if and the way they’d wish to volunteer within the occasion a walkout is known as.

The guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers nonetheless have till Wednesday to make a deal. They prolonged their present contract, which had been set to run out on June 30, till July 12 to permit bargaining to proceed.

On June 5, the guild’s members voted 98% in favor of authorizing a strike if a good deal couldn’t be reached. Since then, greater than 1,700 members signed a letter to SAG-AFTRA leaders urging them to face sturdy on the bargaining desk and “join the WGA on the picket lines” if a serious “realignment in our industry” can’t be achieved. The Writers Guild strike is now in its 67th day.

Prior to the strike authorization vote, the guild laid out a few of its key bargaining points, which embrace “economic fairness, residuals, regulating the use of artificial intelligence and alleviating the burdens of the industry-wide shift to self-taping.”

With respect to financial equity, the guild stated:

“Outdated contract phrases, coupled with the evolution of the media enterprise, together with shorter season orders and longer hiatuses between seasons makes it more and more tough for our members to attain and preserve a center class way of life working as a performer. In sharp distinction to the diminishing compensation paid to our members, the studios are posting immense income with a bullish outlook as demonstrated by lavish company govt compensation.

“SAG-AFTRA is committed to ensuring our members are able to make a living performing in scripted dramatic live action entertainment. This means ensuring increased compensation when our members work, shoring up the funding of our Health, Retirement, and Pension Plans, and providing our members a meaningful share of the economic value created by their performances.”

As for residuals, the guild stated that “While new enterprise fashions imply that increasingly more SAG-AFTRA content material is monetized across the globe, residuals funds are failing to replicate the financial worth of this exhibition. SAG-AFTRA is dedicated to making sure residual funds each replicate the financial worth of our members’ contribution, and function a significant supply of performer earnings.

With respect to AI, the guild stated: “Artificial intelligence has already proven to be a real and immediate threat to the work of our members and can mimic members’ voices, likenesses and performances. We must get agreement around acceptable uses, bargain protections against misuse, and ensure consent and fair compensation for the use of your work to train AI systems and create new performances. In their public statements and policy work, the companies have not shown a desire to take our members’ basic rights to our own voices and likenesses seriously.”

Self-taped auditions, in the meantime, “are unregulated and out of control,” the guild stated. “Too many pages, too little time and unreasonable requirements have made self-taping auditions a massive, daily, uncompensated burden on the lives of performers. Reasonable rules and limitations, and access to other casting formats, are sorely needed to ensure fair access to work opportunities and protect performers against exploitation.”