In interview after work stoppage was called Thursday, the union president and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland say that their historic walkout is “serving a purpose beyond our own interests.”
In an interview, union president Fran Drescher and chief negotiator and national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland discussed how they came to this point, and the stakes involved. Not long after a SAG-AFTRA press conference, the two discussed the issues that the union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers agreed on during negotiations, the topics that divided them and why Drescher believes “the whole world is looking at us right now.”
What changed in the negotiating room?
Fran Drescher: That was early on, and we thought we were making progress working on more peripheral issues. But as we tried to get more into the vortex of what our concerns are, that was when we started to get stonewalled. We started to see there was strange resistance to accommodating our request to change the contract to accommodate the current business model, to honor the contributions of our members so that they’re making, not even what they made in 2020, but what they should be making for inflation today and for next three years. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it became clear there was a great deal of resistance and resentment, like we’re not entitled to get what our due is. Like, we’re not a major contributor to this industry. Like we’re sub- somehow and don’t matter. And there were statements that were made by the other side that we kept writing on whiteboards to remind us of who these people seem to be presenting themselves to be. And it’s not nice.
Drescher: The whole world is looking at us now, because human beings in all different walks of life are being replaced by robots.
What happens here, the eyes of the world and certainly labor in this country is looking at. It’s really important that we put barricades around artificial intelligence, because it’s going to put people out of work. It already is putting our members out of work and that is maniacal. What are you doing? Why do you want to do this? Because it’s a little cheaper or a little easier, but it’s unconscionable. If you do it at the expense of people’s livelihoods … Everybody deserves a right to work. I saw a little box running around Santa Monica delivering stuff and my heart broke because I thought, “That used to be a person on a bicycle who made money doing that.” Why put somebody out of work? What’s wrong with these people? It’s not normal.
Crabtree-Ireland: There are several things we agreed upon. One example is they agreed on our proposal to add Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth as holidays in our contract. You know, Martin Luther King Day should have been a holiday a long time ago, and I’m glad they finally abandoned the resistance they’ve had to that proposal in the past. There are some other provisions that we have tentative agreements on that relate to aspects of certain proposals. For example, we have some tentative agreements on some aspects of self-tape casting and things like that. But there are big, important chunks of that where we don’t have agreement. Like, take for example, all the work we’ve done on our self-tape casting proposal — lots of progress there, except for the fact that they continue to insist that all of it has to basically be on an honor system. They insist on a provision that says it’s not subject to any grievance or arbitration, meaning there’s no way to enforce it, so agreeing to self-tape protections that are basically more like a wish and a hope than an actual promise. It really doesn’t do the trick.
Crabtree-Ireland: We’ve withdrawn several proposals that they indicated big resistance to. We had proposal to add compensation for theatrical rereleases where a theatrical picture, after its entire initial run is over, gets rereleased later on. That happens, that makes a lot of money, our members feel like if they’re someone in one of those projects, they should get some compensation. The studios flat-out refused and we withdrew that proposal. But frankly, those moves in their direction weren’t really appreciated or responded to in kind.
Double strike in this industry impacts
Drescher: That was why we did the extension. Because this weighs very heavy on us. We have compassion to everybody and we feel what this is going to do. Many Americans don’t have more than $500 saved. But how can we continue to move forward with a contract that is so dishonoring and so disrespectful? And that is not the direction that any labor [group] in this nation should be moving in. Somebody has to draw the line and get every other labor force behind us, and we’re the best, most likely suspects because we are high-profile people. We get people like you to talk about these grievances that are happening everywhere. We’re just the ones that you’ll talk to. And we are serving a purpose beyond our own interests. Because what happens here, what happens now, is going to have a reverberating effect. Its tentacles are going to reach all corners of the earth.
Crabtree-Ireland: The last time there was a simultaneous strike of SAG or AFTRA and the Writers Guild was in 1960. That was the strike that resulted in the creation of health plan, the pension plan and the establishment of residuals in a significant way. And so sometimes these kinds of strikes are necessary in order to defend the basic needs that our members have. And that’s why we’re there.
