Will the SAG-AFTRA Merger Happen This Time?

Macbeth: If we should fail?

Lady Macbeth: We fail!

But screw your courage to the sticking place,

And we'll not fail.

-- "Macbeth," Act 1, Scene 7

All this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

-- Walt Disney's "Peter Pan"

The announcement April 30 that the Screen Actors Guild had created a committee charged with forging a plan to merge SAG and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists was important for both unions. It was not, however, a big surprise.

Anyone who has paid attention to the two unions for the past two years knows that this process began informally but very much in earnest back in 2009, when Ken Howard was elected SAG president on a pro-merger platform. Last Saturday's news is only the biggest step toward merger to come before the next big step, which should happen May 14, when AFTRA is expected to announce its own parallel committee. Once those two groups, led by their respective union presidents, sit down in the same room together for the first time, SAG and AFTRA will be officially engaged in talks to create a so-called "successor union" encompassing members of both organizations.

Not that they haven't done this before. This will be the fourth trip down the aisle for SAG and AFTRA, the last one having occurred in 2003, an affair that ended when SAG left AFTRA standing at the altar, a guild vote to ratify the merger plan having fallen fewer than two points short of the 60 percent needed to ratify. That defeat kicked off a turf war between the two unions that reached its nadir in 2008, when AFTRA broke off from joint bargaining with SAG and cut its own primetime television deal with producers. The move came as then-SAG president Alan Rosenberg and his political allies issued blistering public attacks against AFTRA and clamored for a strike that never materialized.

When Rosenberg's predecessor, Melissa Gilbert, was elected SAG president in 2001, she, like Howard, had run as a merger candidate. Gilbert became one of the guiding forces behind the Alliance of International Media Artists, the proposed new union that would have been born from a SAG-AFTRA merger. Eight years after losing the ratification fight, Gilbert is convinced that had the AIMA proposal passed, working actors would be better off today.

"Ultimately it would have become a way to merge other performers' unions in North America and across the globe, which was, of course, my grand vision," Gilbert said. "It was a little Don Quixote."

AIMA was conceived as an umbrella union for three semiautonomous labor organizations: SAG (representing actors), AFTRA (representing broadcasters) and the American Federation of Recording Artists (representing, naturally, recording artists, and sharing an acronym with AFTRA's predecessor organization, the American Federation of Radio Artists). In the ballot package mailed to union members April 21, 2003, Gilbert and her AFTRA counterpart, John P. Connolly, made the case for why the time was right for the two unions to finally bind themselves together. They cited corporate consolidation among employers, the rapid growth of digital production technologies, and signs of weakness in both unions' health and pension plans as the prime threats that a merger would help fend off.

Eight years later, media have become even more consolidated, digital production is the norm in television (creating a full-fledged jurisdictional overlap), and pension and health funds have been left bruised by the Great Recession. Consequently, arguments for why now is the right time to merge end up sounding a lot like arguments for why then was the right time.

"It was an extraordinary experience with a really disappointing outcome," Gilbert said. "I remember the night the vote came in, turning to my friends and saying, 'Oh boy, are we in trouble now. I see where this is headed, and there is going to come a time when the two unions are negotiating against one another.' And it happened."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/business/~3/AbcWz5Edooo/will-sag-aftra-merger-happen-188040

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