Actors Fight

The N.Y. Times notes that, despite oncoming summer, things aren't sunny in Tinseltown:.

Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild publicly declared war on a fellow actors’ union at a Monday rally here, increasing the likelihood of new labor strife in an entertainment industry still recovering from a writers’ strike that ended just four months ago ...

“We are engaged in the battle of our lives,” Mr. Rosenberg told a group that appeared to number several hundred and included the actors Ed Asner, Keith Carradine, Justine Bateman and Joely Fisher. “It is essential,” he added, “that we vote down that Aftra deal.”..

Judging from the above, these folks seem determined to gallop into another strike, which would help wreck the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan real good, especially if it went on for as long as the actors' labor action against commercial producers in 2000.

Wiser heads than mine think a second strike will never happen. When I asked a couple of IA bigwigs at the District Two convention if the new AFTRA agreement would get ratified, they assured me it would. This paragraph from the Times hints that they might be correct:

... Monday’s demonstration was relatively small compared with the mass pickets that began the writers’ strike, and fell noticeably short of the demonstrations that accompanied a strike by both SAG and Aftra against commercials producers in 2000.

So. If the AFTRA contract goes down to defeat, we've got big trouble. If it gets approved, less trouble.

SAG's officers seem to forget that "Pattern Bargaining" isn't just some weird theory, but a Hollywood way of life.