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The voting for the camera local ended last night. I do not know the schedule for the other 12 local unions, but the final tabulation should be completed within a few days. Although predictions are worth basically nothing, I cannot resist playing pundit and I predict the contract will pass by a total vote of around 70%, with the lower paying classifications going over 80% YES.

I was extremely suspicious as the theater of this negotiation played out with a Strike Vote being conducted without any meaningful strike preparation. Further playing into my well earned cynicism was the solid wall of secrecy around the details of the negotiation.

However, once the Union Bureaucracy put out the details, this is a far better contract than anybody had a right to expect. This does not mean it is great -- it is just the best package negotiated in decades.

This is from the report to the members:

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This agreement achieves significant changes to our contract that we have sought for decades and does so without any meaningful concessions. Those improvements include: a weekend rest period, increased and prevailing rate meal period penalties, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday as a paid holiday, and additional benefit hours for on-call employees - including our Publicists. We funded our health and benefit plans for the next three years without the cost shifting or the higher pension qualifying threshold the employers demanded, and we achieved industry standard annual wage increases retroactive to August 1, 2021, the date of expiration, as well as wage increases for streaming content.

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As I posted when this first hit the news several weeks ago, this is an Industry Contract -- one of the last ones in the USA. Going into bargaining, the high wages and very restrictive jurisdictional provisions such as mandatory staffing for some classifications seemed to be very tempting targets for the employers.

Over the last few years, a new layer of corporate ownership has bought out or at least into most of the various studios. Meanwhile, streaming companies like Apple and Amazon have already established a major position in the movie business.

During litigation with Warner Bros and Disney from October 2020 until I quit at the end of last August I found that the Labor Relations personnel whom I had been dealing with for the last decade could not conduct business as usual any more. Specifically, they had to "report" to Big Bosses that had never bothered with union shit before. Now Those Suits were blocking a settlement of National Labor Relations Board Charges I had filed in protest of the basically random layoffs of 18 publicists. The harder the NLRB pushed for them to settle for a lump sum to each employee discharged, the harder the push back came.

Based on the norms of Business As Usual, I was actually embarrassed at how paltry our proposed settlement was and there is not the slightest doubt that we would have settled those cases without any hassle or rancor. That looked like a mindset I had seen dozens of times over the decades as the management class has been kicking our ass with very little respite.

That experience misled me to believe that a wall to wall union busting campaign was under way. This would be the best time ever to break this archaic Industry Contract. All they had to do was take a strike from IATSE, the Hollywood union that had never conducted a strike, to get rid of the high wages and featherbedding built into the contract.

It turns out that the producers never even proposed any of the takeaways that would bust the union. I am very favorably impressed that union head Matt Loeb insisted on business as usual -- and started the process toward an actual industry shut down to maintain business as usual -- which means incremental steps forward without any structural changes to the contract. That is the victory and it is huge.
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A very good case can be made that Business As Usual is not a victory. The most important issue to the skilled classifications was long hours -- which was not addressed at all. Instead the meal and rest provisions were improved significantly, which pretty well defines the conundrum for unions now. Keeping what you have and getting Blue Sounding "incremental" improvements may not be adequate now. Further, it is possible that the Union blew the opportunity of a lifetime by treating this as a Business As Usual negotiation.

Instead of the stolid march toward a Strike Vote, the union could have been revving up for a major confrontation as of early 2021. Instead of a chaotic attempt to stop all the productions everywhere, a focused strategy of targeting one or just a few Producers would make for a great campaign. I thought that Warners and Disney made the perfect poster children for Corporate Betrayal.

We could easily put tens of thousands of people in front of Disney Land and Disney World for specific demonstrations. We could easily keep picket lines with a hundred or more people every weekend. The stir from this kind of street action builds its own cycle of news worthiness.

Meanwhile, we could engage in random picketing of Big Buck productions to shut production down, while the other crafts and the megabuck Talent on the show have to be paid.

There has been no reason for the Entertainment Guilds to play that kind a hard ball for more than 50 years. Almost all of my union representative colleagues in this industry have no experience at all with serious conflict with the Industry -- and even less understanding of how to fight a Gigabuck Industry like The Movies.

I am the most radical guy I know from the ranks of union business agents, but I did not and would not advocate picking this fight at this time.

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I would call this a sellout if I thought it was. Instead it is a victory for the people who work on movie sets. Not much impact beyond this industry, but getting creamed in a failed strike would have been really bad for everybody in the country.

Two and three quarter cheers for Matt Loeb and the International Alliance of Stage and Theatrical Employees!