A-List Actors Threaten to Strike in Letter to SAG

Via Rolling Stone:

Earlier this month, members of the Screen Actors Guild voted to authorize a strike if their negotiating committee doesn’t reach an agreement on a new contract with major Hollywood studios by June 30. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher released a video message this week with an update on the negotiations, telling members, “We are having an [sic] extremely productive negotiations that are laser focused on all of the crucial issues you told us are most important to you. We’re standing strong and we are going to achieve a seminal deal.”

But the message didn’t sit right with a lot of actors who are urging SAG not to settle for a deal that doesn’t represent all of their demands. More than 300 actors signed a letter addressed to the SAG-AFTRA Leadership and Negotiating Committee that’s circulating and was allegedly sent to leadership expressing their concern with the idea that “SAG-AFTRA members may be ready to make sacrifices that leadership is not.”

“We hope you’ve heard the message from us: This is an unprecedented inflection point in our industry, and what might be considered a good deal in any other years is simply not enough,” the letter, obtained by Rolling Stone, says. “We feel that our wages, our craft, our creative freedom, and the power of our union have all been undermined in the last decade. We need to reverse those trajectories.”

The message was signed by hundreds of members, including Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Rami Malek, Quinta Brunson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ben Stiller, Neil Patrick Harris, Amy Schumer, and Amy Poehler.

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In their sign-off, actors ask their leadership to “push for change” and to ensure the protections they’re asking for. “If you are not able to get all the way there, we ask that you use the power given to you by us, the membership, and join the WGA on the picket lines,” they write. “For our union and its future, this is our moment. We hope that, on our behalf, you will meet that moment and not miss it.”

“This is an unprecedented inflection point in our industry.”

That’s what the WGA leadership has been saying all along. That’s why 97% of Guild members who voted for the strike authorization is saying.

Nothing epitomizes that more than the debate about AI. If the companies have substituted “creating content” for “writing stories,” it doesn’t matter what the public thinks AI is capable of producing or not. The companies are all about profits. If they believe AI can “create content” that will reduce costs (i.e., cut jobs which used to be filled by human writers), they will do it. Hell, they’re likely already doing it.

Will SAG leadership actually see the reality of this “unprecedented inflection point in our industry” … or will they bow down to the AMPTP with their nominal monetary offers?

We’ll know very soon.

For the rest of the Rolling Stone article, go here.

For the latest updates on the strike and news resources, go here.

A-List Actors Threaten to Strike in Letter to SAG was originally published in Go Into The Story on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.