Thursday, September 24, 2009

Sanity From SAG

The Screen Actors Guild has taken another step to sanity by electing their new Prez.

Ken Howard's election to national president of the Screen Actors Guild amounts to a repudiation of the uncompromising strategy that previous prexy Alan Rosenberg embodied during his four-year tenure.

With an impressive 47% of the vote after a bitter race, Howard's win for a two-year term sets the stage for the next round of contract negotiations -- and once again raises questions of a merger with sister thesp guild AFTRA.

Over the past few years, SAG has been run by ... how do I put this delicately? ... fanatics* who are totally divorced from reality.

Let's look at the recent handiwork of these folks. They negotiated a three-year contract that had 3% annual wage increases, but by cleverly dragging their feet for the better part of a year and not getting it ratified in a timely manner, they were able to whittle down contractual increases to 2% per year ((0%, 3%, 3%).

Happily, the geniuses behind this strategy no longer hold a majority on SAG's national board, so there is a marginally better chance that there won't be an industry shutdown in 2011. I hope.

* "Fanatics" in this contest are people who keep doing the same things over and over ... and failing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

47% of the vote is 'impressive'??? I don't understand how that can be considered a mandate.

Anonymous said...

What Steve fails to mention is that there were four candidates for President, which made it very unlikely that anyone was going to get a majority.

Also that the anti-hardline factions picked up seats on both the Hollywood and New York boards as well as the national board.

Steve Hulett said...

47% is impressive when you know that the next candidate got 33% ... and the one below that percentage got 18%.

Read all about it in the linked article.

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