SAG-AFTRA Board Unanimously Decides to Put Strike Authorization Vote to Members

thewrap.com:

a statement announcing the vote.While unanimity among SAG-AFTRA’s board is no guarantee that rank and file membership will agree to a strike, the issues listed in the guild’s statement very closely mirror those raised by the Writers Guild of America, which is in the third week of a strike that is increasingly interrupting Hollywood business.Writers have been on strike since May 2, and in part are seeking to reverse recent trends in the industry that have come to define the streaming era — for instance, they note sky-high salaries executives earn while creatives, especially writers, are struggling to support themselves.

WGA is in particular calling out industry practices that they say have turned Hollywood into a “gig economy,” such as so-called “mini rooms” where writers with a television pitch must form a writer room on their own dime and create an entire season’s worth of scripts before a show is even greenlit.

And WGA is also calling attention to the risks so-called “ai” poses to creative labor generally.SAG-AFTRA members have shown enormous solidarity with striking writers, starting on the second day, when SAG-AFTRA leaders and members joined hundreds of representatives from 5 other Hollywood unions at a massive rally in support of the WGA.Then on May 8, SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher joined a WGA picket line in Los Angeles. “We all understand that we have entered a streaming age, and that the expiring contracts reflect a different period in entertainment history,” Drescher told TheWrap at the time.