Hollywood Contraction: How Fewer Jobs & The Threat Of Another Strike Is Pushing BTL Workers To The Brink

deadline.com:

Editor’s note: This is the second installment in the Deadline series Hollywood Contraction, which examines the job losses caused by the ongoing, industrywide cost-cutting. Sunday’s Unity Rally that was meant to fire up crew members before IATSE and Teamsters Local 399 begin negotiations with Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers served two important goals: it reminded below-the-line workers that union leaders will be dogged in their fight for better benefits and pension for members, and how they’ll be ready to “shut it down, f–king day one” if the talks don’t go their way.

But no matter how many times Local 399’s Lindsay Dougherty dropped an f-bomb or the crowd shouted “many crafts, one fight,” there was no mention of the real elephant in the room, er, parking lot — namely, how many (or few) crew members are actually working these days because of accelerated contraction in Hollywood.

On stage, it was all talk about “this is how solidarity looks like” and how the studios are “white-collar crime syndicates.” But away from the featured speakers and the sounds of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasting from the loudspeakers, local reps privately lamented about how their members were bombarding their offices with desperate calls about the lack of employment.

The wave of series cancellations, coupled with the serious belt-tightening and virtually non-existent pilot season, has led to fewer and fewer below-the-line jobs for below-the-line workers. “We were expecting, especially with the resolution of the strikes, production to be rampant out here.