SAGWatch – Observing the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA

And Jonathan Handel gets quoted on the big international version of the story from Reuters:

       The largest U.S. actors union mailed out ballots Tuesday and key union leaders recommended that the union’s 120,000 members approve a contract offer from Hollywood studios.

       The tentative deal reached in April between the Screen Actors Guild and Hollywood studios averted the immediate threat of a strike that would have slowed movie and TV production.

       But it also caused discord in the union, with moderates in key leadership posts calling the offer the best deal possible, and hardliners saying it will not pay actors enough for work delivered on new media, including the Internet and phones.

       Jonathan Handel, an entertainment attorney who has monitored the contract talks, said that he expects the discord to continue during the voting process, which ends June 9.

       “I think this is going to be hard-fought, because the hardline faction is really adamantly opposed to making a deal on any realistic terms,” Handel said.

       Industry experts say they expect union moderates to win the simple majority they need to approve the proposal, which would replace a contract that expired in June 2008.

       The two-year proposed agreement between SAG and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios, contains an immediate 3 percent wage

increase, followed by a 3.5 percent raise next year.

       SAG produced a video with “St. Elsewhere” star Ed Begley Jr., “Chicago Hope” lead Adam Arkin and other actors urging members to approve the proposed agreement.

       Absent from the video, available on the SAG Web site, are big-name Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks and Sally Field, who in December urged SAG members to oppose a possible strike, when hardliners were considering that route.

       “I think the union is trying to show that this is a matter of the rank-and-file wanting to get back to work, it’s not really about which stars might line up on which side of the issue,” Handel said.

Ironically, the Reuters story came the same day as Handel’s latest post, which talks about SAG falling off the radar of the MSM. That post has one of the most biting lines we’ve seen yet on Membership First (and we’ve seen plenty!).

For almost two years, the hardliners have acted as though they come from another galaxy, or at least from Planet Claire, where (as the B-52’s explained) “no one has a head.”

And he’s even more pointed in his analysis of the opponents of the TV-Theatrical deal, who insist that SAG should hold out for more:

Several additional factors helped make the search for better terms than three other unions a doomed mission to a dead planet. These were (1) the general uncertainty surrounding new media business models, (2) the economic fatigue suffered by actors and the rest of the industry in the wake of the 100 day writers strike, and (3) SAG’s lack of bargaining leverage, the latter a circumstance engineered by the hardliners themselves. (The recession, whose severity was at first unclear, only made things worse.) It’s as though the hardliners thought they could run at warp speed on cubic zirconia rather than dilithium crystals. Failure was not only an option, it was the predictable outcome.

In case you’ve forgotten, the ballots are due back June 9, and we expect results the next day.