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The SAG Thing? Still Going On

The unresolved situation with the Screen Actors’ Guild has been going on so long that it’s almost hard to remember a time when they had a collective agreement. The latest twist is that SAG’s Board of Directors voted to accept virtually the same deal they were offered ten months ago, a deal that consists of the same terms that the other showbiz unions accepted last year, only several months later. But because the vote was very close, it is possible (but unlikely) that the union membership could be persuaded to vote down the agreement when it comes up for a full vote next month. Mark Evanier, who has had a lot of good posts on this issue, thinks that “in the end, the contract will pass by a wider margin with the membership than it did at the board level.”

Whether SAG handled this situation well or not is not really for me to say, but their problem for the last few months has been that in a recession, a year after another strike, it would be very hard to get a strike authorized (especially when many of the union’s highest-profile members have been lobbying against a strike). Hence the SAG leadership has been trying to look like it’s considering its options, when everybody knows that it doesn’t really have a whole lot of options at the moment.