Campaign Watch: Time To Decide
A couple of comments and e-mails got us thinking about the distinctions between the two principal factions in SAG and the two principal slates running in AFTRA. They’re really parallel in their thinking.
As we see it, both groups recognize that we’re in this to try to improve the wages and working conditions of all members. But their differences encompass almost everything else.
The Unite for Strength-AFTRA Leadership Team-USAN-AFTRA Now-RBD side seems recognize that negotiations won’t always produce perfect outcomes, but that the perfect should not be the killer of the good. The Membership First opposition argues that there are bright lines that can’t be crossed.
The Unite for Strength-AFTRA Leadership Team-USAN-AFTRA Now-RBD side supports working together closely, and ultimately supports one union for all performers. The Membership First opposition supports one union for actors, and would exclude non-actors. That union, they insist, should be a Hollywood-controlled SAG. Regardless of their current rhetoric, their forays into AFTRA politics are designed only to lead to stripping AFTRA of actors in order ultimately to kill the union (though they probably would argue that it doesn’t matter, beause the actors would be protected by their version of SAG, even if other peformers were left out in the cold.)
The current AFTRA elections and the TV-Theatrical balloting will be important tests of which direction the membership wants to take things. This September’s SAG elections will be every bit as important.
If Unite for Strength - which has endorsed the AFTRA Leadership Team - prevails, it’s quite possible that the past few years of discord can be put behind us. If not, the brush war of the past year could easily become the Afghanistan of union politics.
In war there are no winners, only victors….and the causalty will be SAG and its members. MF looks at that an acceptable loss for their continued effort of control.
I voted YES to ratify the TV/Theatrical contract.
Everything you’ve written here makes a great deal of sense, except the last paragraph.
To paraphrase the old SportsCenter joke “You can’t stop Membership First, you can only hope to contain it.” They aren’t going away, and the internal discord will continue unless and until leadership of the dissenting faction (and there always should be a dissenting faction) passes to individuals willing to give up the tactics that have discredited MF.
I think a good chance for that change was missed at the picnic, where one decent sized lightning bolt could have made Griffith Park the modern equivalent of the road to Damascus for the congregated crew. Frankly, I think that kind of transition is going to take divine intervention on a major scale.
Absent that, SAG will probably always have the noisy fringe. As has been noted elsewhere on this board, the utility of the fringe is to make the center cognizant of new things in the wind. You just can’t let the noise drown out deliberation and debate.
There will (and should) always be an opposition, but the identity of those parties in oppositions can change over time. Ask the shades of the Federalists, Whigs, and Know Nothings.
A responsible leadership of a new faction that coopts some of MF’s concerns without taking on their tactics could arise and transfer membership support from MF to themselves in fairly short order. I have to assume that there are many actors who are sympathetic to MF’s core concerns while being heartily annoyed at their tactics of the last few months.
If and when we start talking about the specifics of merger I think some kind of,yes, I’m going to say it, qualified voting is necessary to bring sanity to whatever union emerges. Views and opinions about what is and what is not essential and important are vastly different for the working actors and the non working. It is not a matter of elitism but of
the practical reality of workers being able to determine their own best interests. Some minimum level of work history must prevail, as it does in almost every other union, in deciding who votes for what.
GEO – “I have to assume that there are many actors who are sympathetic to MF’s core concerns while being heartily annoyed at their tactics of the last few months.”
THE LAST FEW MONTHS? TRY THE LAST TEN YEARS!
Geo,
I’ve asked this before when somebody raises the point you just did without ever getting any real answer.
What do you identify as MF’s “core concerns” that separate them from the moderates, other than being anti-merger and simply hating everything else about the moderates?
It has to be more than simply saying “we care about middle class actors.” EVERYBODY cares about middle class actors when it comes to election time. As far as qualified voting is concerned, until the moderates actually say they are for it, all the screaming by MF is just more rabble rousing.
If there is going to be an opposition to moderate leadership, it will obviously center on the merger. Can you make a logical case against merger? Can anyone? Is the mere desire to stay separate from AFTRA a good enough reason to oppose it? Can an opposition stay away from raising false fears about combining the benefit plans long enough to explain why merger wouldn’t be a good idea?
There’s always qualified voting as a dividing line, but, to be honest, to this point MF is the only side that has raised it. True to their particular brand of hypocrisy, they sneered at the “weatherman in Peoria” who voted on AFTRA’s Exhibit A while never working under the contract, but decry their own “hobbyists” within SAG who oppose them for the very same reason. Qualified voting may be a legitimate way of distinguishing between two factions in SAG, but you’re going to have to divorce the issue from the heated rhetoric MF has employed before the subject can be discussed rationally.
As far as that opposition is concerned, it really isn’t enough to simply be against what the majority is for. MF proved that when it got control of the National Board and discovered it had no vision and no goal other than to be the baddest-ass leaders of the baddest-ass union on the block. Once they achieved control, they had nowhere to go. You’ve referred to your knowledge of U.S. history. The lesson of the Know Nothings should sound familiar here.
So a new opposition has to be FOR something, too. From my viewpoint, MF’s example can’t help because as close as they claim to being for something was just general platitudes about middle-class actors. So what can the new opposition stake out as their territory.
one of the core differences is this
MF has always felt the producers are the enemy out to screw actors any chance they get. They say producers want a greatly weakened union and ultimately want to do away with any residual system and go to a one time buy out use.
They feel that actors must be agressive and in your face when dealing with producers.
They also feel that anyone who has a SAG card, regardless of any work history should have the right to vote on everything. This, I think, arises from the thought that “if I have a SAG card, I must be an actor” and work history has little to do with that.
Within the MF population you will find different levels of fervor on these points but every one of them will be there
I don’t think I want to set myself up as MF spokesperson. I’d be lousy at it, and I don’t have a vote in either SAG or AFTRA elections anyway. Perhaps some non-elected MF supporters can tell us why they vote for MF instead of U4S.
Well, one addition to Kathy’s list it seems to me I’ve heard a lot from both WGA and SAG militants –”If you let yourself get ‘temporarily’ screwed at the beginning of a technology transition, you stay screwed forever”.
geo: I’ve heard that technology transition argument also. It’s a good sign that the person making the argument has no clue about the purpose of a union.
“You stay screwed forever” is pretty much an admission that the speaker doesn’t understand what the power of organized labor is, where it comes from, and how it should be used. It’s as trite and mindless as “we never got anything we didn’t strike for.”
You stay screwed as long as your union doesn’t have the power to make management change its behavior, and that power has far more dimensions than the strike threat. It’s clear that these truths have never entered the minds of the MFers (or, for that matter, Young and Verrone over at the WGA).