THB #378: What about SAG? - Part 1

This newsletter has been much more focused on the WGA Strike than the SAG/Aftra Strike for a variety of reasons. It’s been going on 2 months longer… WGA negotiations have fewer very specific details which would overwhelm most readers… they are further down the road on negotiating the biggest issues… and…

SAG/Aftra, by any real standard, is a lot closer to a deal than WGA is.

It’s not that either union is softer (looking at you, DGA) or tougher. It’s that the restructuring of The Norm of television production has a lot more weight on the work lives of writers than on actors.

Producers may cutback and even cheat in various ways to cut costs on a production… but in the end, you need a certain number of hours and a certain amount of incoming footage of a certain quality expected by your distributing companies to have a viable television show or movie. The process before there is a set - the writer’s place, for the most part - has proven more vulnerable, putting the measurement of quality aside, not just paying less, but disappearing jobs on each show.

Again… please don’t look at this as a comparison of suffering. It is not meant to be that. But as you read through what is being negotiated, writers are mostly fighting for what happens before the expensive part, production, and actors are mostly fighting for what happens at the time of or right before that expensive part. Both are important. Both have been squeezed hard. But there are distinct differences.

For instance, SAG/Aftra members have a wide array of costs associated with simply getting to work that writers generally do not. They are all significant. But they are also more easily negotiated towards agreement.

There are a lot of details in the SAG memorandum that I don’t really know enough to speak to intelligently. Rules about Dancers and Singers and Schedule F, oh my! So I won’t try to answer for these issues.

SAG put out a 12-page guide to the status of negotiations 3 days after the start of the strike, July 14. There hasn’t been much, if any, negotiating since. You can also read the AMPTP response, reprinted here by The Washington Post.

So…

I think Minimums can be settled or is already in view of being settled. SAG/Aftra wants a double dip increase in the first year of the new deal, asking 11%, then 4%, then 4%. AMPTP has offered 5%, 4%, and 3.5%. I would bet on them settling at 7%, 4%, and 4%.