Labor Peace

I'm a day late with this, but SAG has agreed to a new voice actor deal:.

The Screen Actors Guild has reached agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers on a pair of two-year contracts covering voice actors working in TV animation and basic animation.

The contracts go into effect immediately and are retroactive to June 10. They replace pacts that expired over a year ago and had been extended until last Jan. 15.

It's hard to know what all the wrinkles of this deal are, but if you calculate SAG's package over a three-year span, it got zip in the first year (due to a stall-out in reaching an overall agreement), 3% in the second year, and 3.5% in the third year. There's also a .5% pension kick-in that looks as though the total deal over 3 years is worth about 7%.

A 3% wage boost that would have happened in the first year of the contract became a black hole with zero salary increases when no agreement was reached and the studios wouldn't retroactively bump wages.

So, if you're scoring at home:

SAG's Voice Actor Agreement raises its wages 6.5% over three years, and gets a .5% pension kick-in.

TAG raises its wages 6% over three years, with a pension-health kick in of 4.5% over three years.

IA national contract for area standards (repping IA unions across the country), 6% wage boost over three years, with 1.5% annual pension improvements.

IA Basic Agreement (negotiated last Fall): 3% annual wage increases, 4.5% health-pension increases over three years.

TAG-Nick contract (negotiated last Fall): same as IA Basic Agreement above.

DGA and WGA Agreements (negotiated nineteen months ago): 3% annual wage boosts.

It's pretty clear how the landscape has changed as the economy has crumbled. Labor contracts are less rich now than a year ago. (There's a surprise.)