SAG's Future Hanging in the Balance

It’s go day for the Screen Actors Guild. After almost a year of controversies, drama, internecene fighting and a de facto strike, the end of the rollercoaster ride could come as early as Tuesday night if the guild’s newly reconfigured task force agrees to a deal with the AMPTP.

Well, over for now. (Update: After a day of meetings on Tuesday, the negotiators adjourned to continue their talks on Wednesday.)  

SAG stands at a crossroads. The new guild negotiators – led by interim national executive director David White and chief negotiator John McGuire -- may well take the deal offered by the studios for $250 million.

If they do, it will be only a tepid victory at best. And probably a temporary one.
For it has been decades since the guild has been able to flex its muscles as a potent force. Instead the studios and world have watched Hollywood’s largest union fracture from within, and become an essentially diminishing protector of its rank-and-file membership.

Can SAG get it together? To some, the question is a larger one about the future of unions in this country in the 21st century.

In a world where the foundation of organized labor – domestic manufacturing - has disappeared, and where the guilds in the entertainment industry have been in slow retreat for decades, it seems fair to question if there are alternatives to the current spectacle of internal fighting ending in studio givebacks.

As labor unions retreat, workers on the lower rungs of the labor force are beginning to experiment with other ways of organizing.

One alternative is something called a “workers center.”  They act as pressure groups on employers but do not conduct collective bargaining. The National Day Laborers network, and the Restaurant Opportunity Center in New York have such “centers,” as do car wash workers in Los Angeles.

Actors may not relish going this route. But it’s been a long time since “Norma Rae,” and union membership in America has been in decline for decades.
The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that 12.4% of employed wage and salary workers were union members in 2008, a slight increase from 12.1% in 2007. The number of workers belonging to a union rose by 428,000 to 16.1 million.

In 1983, union membership was 20.1% of the working population.

In the 1950s, one in three American workers were union members.

(Incidentally, Norma Rae herself – Sally Field - has been outspoken against a SAG strike.)

Chris Tilly, director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and Professor in the Urban Planning Department, said years of intimidation by corporations have discouraged workers from organizing.

“The laws are designed to protect workers’ rights to form unions, but they don’t do a very good job of it. It’s not hard for employers to derail a union campaign,” Tilly said. “It’s not legal for employers to fire workers, but they do it and the penalties are very small….

 

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