IATSE President Matthew Loeb Says Guild Is Willing To Strike, If Needed: “Folks Are Fed Up…Nothing Is Off The Table”

deadline.com:

IATSE President Matthew Loeb did not mince words today when asked if his local unions were willing to strike if this spring’s contract negotiations with the AMPTP did not go well. “Nothing’s off the table, and we’re not going to give up our strength and our ability because they sapped us,” said Loeb to cheers at a CES panel of Hollywood labor leaders. “Everybody’s bank account got sapped because they were unreasonable for months and months.

My folks aren’t going to just settle.” Despite the fact that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes dominated much of last year, Loeb said his membership is not strike-weary, but weary of the AMPTP’s tactics. “Folks are fed up.

And I don’t know what to call it, if it’s a post-Covid wake of dissatisfaction, but people are ready to fight and the studios would be ill advised to think that they’ve weakened us to the point that we can’t,” he said.

Much of the discussion during the panel, which occurred at the Las Vegas tech summit CES, was centered on AI, given the nature of last year’s strikes and announcement today that SAG-AFTRA had inked a deal with Replica Studios regarding the use of AI digital voice replicas in video games.