SAG approves tentative deal
April 19th, 2009National board okays two-year contract
By DAVE MCNARY
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118002592.html?categoryid=18&cs=1
A badly split SAG national board approved a two-year tentative deal on its feature-primetime contract, triggering a ratification vote by the guild’s 120,000 members.
The board’s approval came Sunday, two days after SAG execs and the congloms hammered out the final details of the pact.
As SAG’s yearlong contract drama heads into its final act, the battlefield for the guild now shifts from bargaining with the majors to selling the deal to its 120000 members for ratification.
That will be no easy task for guild leaders, given the vehement opposition to the tentative agreement from SAG prexy Alan Rosenberg and his allies. It’s expected that the deal will be approved by a majority of SAG voters, but a pitched PR battle is sure to ensue in the next few weeks as SAG hardliners try to rally as many no votes as possible to send a message to the guild’s new executive regime — and to set the tone for SAG’s fall election of officers and board members.
Ballots will be mailed out next week.
SAG toppers announced the tentative deal Friday afternoon, 10 months after the contract expired, after the previous pact expired, after the congloms relented on SAG’s demand for an expiration date in June 2011. That date will keep SAG in synch with the WGA, DGA and AFTRA expirations, but SAG won’t get any retroactive pay gains — worth $67 million, according to the companies — under the new deal.
Key parts of SAG’s deal include a 3.5% annual hike in minimums and spells out the pay structure for shows streamed on and made for the Internet. That’s the same deal the companies offered on June 30 but was spurned by the hardliners who advocated holding out for sweeter terms.
Should the deal be approved by members, it will extinguish what’s been a nagging uncertainty for the business for the past year. Studios and nets worried that a SAG strike might emerge, even though control of the national board shifted in the fall to a moderate coalition, and local feature production continued to vanish with first-quarter off-lot activity in Hollywood at an all-time low.
The campaign period will undoubtedly see SAG’s ruling moderate coalition campaigning for the deal while blasting the opposition for its stalling tactics and for alienating AFTRA to the point that the sister union broke off from SAG and signed its own primetime deal last summer. Rosenberg vociferously opposed the AFTRA deal, which received a 62% endorsement.
The Membership First faction, which lost control of the board in the fall, has claimed that actors should vote down the pact, due to it not giving thesps enough revenues from the shift of programming to digital platforms.
Both sides agree that the contract battle has left SAG in a weaker position. Rosenberg’s complained repeatedly that the lack of unity among board members wound up de-levaraging while the moderates contend that Doug Allen — handpicked in 2006 by Rosenberg to be national exec director — bungled the negotiations.
Membership First has also bitterly opposed the ouster of Allen in January after he angered the moderates by continuing to seek a strike authorization amid accusations of incompetence at the bargaining table. Allen was replaced by David White as interim national exec director and John McGuire as chief negotiator.
The new deal also contains the same general new-media terms as the WGA, DGA and AFTRA pacts.
“These so-called moderates are giving away our future,” said SAG member Scott Wilson, who’s led a series of rallies against the deal in recent months. “This deal will destroy our pension and health plans, which will be the death knell for working actors making a living.”
With the moderates having a narrow margin on the 71-member national board, the ratification campaign will also mark a kickoff for the board election in September.
The final deal comes following two months of back-channels talks between SAG toppers and moguls such as Disney’s Robert Iger and Warner Bros. Barry Meyer with SAG’s McGuire and AMPTP exec VP Carol Lombardini executing the specifics of the new pact.
In a separate action, leaders of SAG and AFTRA unanimously endorsed a three-year commercials pact on Saturday, triggering a ratification vote among the 150,000 members of both unions.
The commercials deal marked a return to joint negotiations by SAG and AFTRA, which split angrily a year ago and negotiated a separate primetime deal. The unions and the ad industry reached the tentative agreement — which represents a $36 million pay hike over three years, including $21 million more in pension and health contributions — on April 1.
Ballots will be mailed this week with a return date in mid-May. Easy passage is expected.
The commercials contract, which covers nearly $1 billion in annual blurb work, will be retroactive to April 1 and run through March 31, 2012. For the unions, key gains came in establishment of a payment structure for work made for and moved over to the Internet and other new-media platforms; a 0.5% increase in the employer contribution rate to the unions’ pension and health plans, bringing the total contribution rate to 15.3%; and maintaining the current method of pay-per-play payment for ads run on network.
The ad biz managed to hold down annual salary gains to about 2%, or 5.1% for the life of the pact, significantly below the 3% and 3.5% gains in Hollywood union contracts last year, and it won a first-ever cap on employer contributions to pension and health. Both sides also agreed to a two-year study to revamp compensation based on ratings rather than pay-per-play.