Saturday, April 30, 2011

Merger Time ... Again

It must be the season.

SAG National Board Unanimously Moves Towards Merger with AFTRA

The Board establishes a Merger Taskforce to work with AFTRA on developing a formal plan for merger.

After at least two failed attempts, decades of discussion, recent year marked by acrimony and then reconciliation, the game is once again afoot ... SAG and AFTRA are moving decisively closer to merger. The move today was SAG’s, whose national board has now unanimously established a merger taskforce to work with AFTRA to develop “a formal plan to unite SAG and AFTRA members in one union” ...

This river dance we've seen before. A dozen or so years ago, SAG was this close to getting through its wedding vows with AFTRA, then many of the old guard said: "Eeew. We're not getting into bed with those icky radio and television people, we're act-ORS."

And the final vote tally for joining together was negative, and the nuptials never happened.

Then, of course, the more moderate AFTRA commenced gobbling up SAG's work, and after awhile there was anger mixed with remorse on the part of the Screen Actors Guild. (I think some of the more mule-headed players on SAG's executive board started waking up to the fact that actors ... like most other entertainment employees ... follow the work, not the union. And the labor organization repping act-ORS wasn't quite as wonderful and inviolate as they had earlier imagined. Sometimes it's a hard lesson to learn.)

My hunch is, now that the dinosaurs blocking earlier mergers are out of the picture, and it's obvious that there is more strength in being one union, that the marriage so long delayed will finally happen.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the last show I was on, our voice cast was comprised mostly of live action actors who had a lot of experience in both television and film, and not small films either. And who were we contracted with? AFTRA!

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