The dramatic cat-and-mouse game that led to Paramount Skydance’s winning bid for Warner Bros. Discovery kept the SAG-AFTRA analytics team on high alert for weeks – but the actors’ union is still not ready to render its verdict on what it means for members, executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland said Sunday.
Crabtree-Ireland spoke with TheWrap from the red carpet of the 32nd Annual Actor Awards at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall. Asked about what the union is doing to protect its members in the face of the impending megamerger, he remained noncommittal – but not because the union hasn’t been scrambling to keep up with the news.
“This has been such a volatile process that we’ve all been dealing with,” he said. “We have a media and labor economics team within the union whose job is to analyze things like this, and they have been hard at work analyzing the implications of the merger, and of course, with every new offer, with every new configuration that requires a new in depth analysis.”
Even with the offer in the bag and all that effort, SAG-AFTRA isn’t quite ready to make the call.
“So we haven’t come out and support or against – at this time we’re doing that analysis, but when the time is right for us to say something about that, we will, and I can assure you that it will be driven by what is in the best interest of SAG AFTRA as members, which I think will be very aligned with the interests of other workers in the industry as well,” he said.
Watch his complete statement in the video below.
Crabtree-Ireland was also asked about the ongoing Writers Guild strike, and what it could mean for upcoming SAG-AFTRA talks.
“We’re a union fundamentally so we obviously support union workers rights to organize, rights to engage in collective bargaining,” he said. “With the Writers Guild about to launch into their own negotiations … we stand in full unity and solidarity with them in that process. These negotiations, the negotiations with the studios and streamers, are going to be absolutely essential to moving the industry forward and affect many 10s of 1000s of workers in the industry. So we’re standing in unity with the right skilled on that and of course, supporting every workers right to organize, to collectively bargain, and if necessary, to strike.”
