The Canadian strike is on and all eyes turn to the North. The battle over the future of the EMI sector is underway. Digitalization is at the heart of the strike as this piece from Canadian TV (online!) indicates.
CTV.ca | Inside the Actors’ Picket Lines: FAQ on the Dispute
As this report in CFO.com suggests, there seems to be something in the water at the SEC that turns otherwise experienced and competent SEC Chairmen into politically tone deaf bureaucrats. After years of growing pressure to change the regime of stock options, and at the very point that shareholder activists succeed in ousting a major CEO over excessive pay (Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli), and just as Congressman Barney Frank takes over as head of the House committee that oversees his agency, the SEC’s Chris Cox decides to give public companies a free pass that allows them to disclose stock option the way Enron reported its earnings from off balance sheet entities!
This is a useful commentary on the dramatic rise to power of private equity funds. The upside has limits and there are strong indications that the incentives can be skewed against the large institutions, including pension funds, that funnel money into this off-exchange world.
The Guilds and other labor organizations in the entertainment and media industries have two signficant advantages. First, they are collective bodies that (generally) act with the legitimacy that only a democratic organization can provide. Second, only the Guilds can write achievements like higher residual rates into collective bargaining agreements that can be enforced across the board and long into the future – in other words, they can institutionalize gains for their members in a way that other forms of activity (such as using an individual agent or lawyer).
The Guilds are not business organizations seeking a profit. Businesses constantly suffer from the conflicts that profit seeking sets up as inevitable. The fracturing of the agents into two tiers described by the LA Times recently – with the high end looking more like producers everyday – reflects this kind of pressure. Democracy and transparency help overcome that fracturing in unions. When used effectively a union’s collective power can mobilize hundreds of thousands if not millions of people behind a collective bargaining agenda. That means the Guilds can, if they want, reshape the entire structure of the EMI sector. They have, in fact, already done that several times in the past. What other industry has the kind of collective agreements that cover professionals of such high skill? Very few. If used to confront the new delivery systems and financial structures the collective power of the Guilds can make gains that benefit all actors – stars or not.
At the end of the day, in fact, the agents, lawyers and managers know they are better off with the collective power of the Guilds establishing a base of wage rates, residuals, and working conditions upon which they can build rather than having no base at all. And presumably most successful actors know how difficult it is to count on the kind of success that top tier stars have and how fragile that is.
The collective power of the Guilds is critical to blocking a race to the bottom in the industry. That does not mean, of course, that among the agents – particularly at the top tier groups like ICM, WM, CAA and Endeavor – there is not a plan afoot to basically replace the Guilds with the agencies. the role benig played by some of the agencies amounts to a form of dual unionism with a company union in the form of the agents. This suggests that the effort to improving the relationship between the Agents and the Guilds will be a complex process.
Anyone looking to predict what negotiations are going to look like when the major collective agreements between actors, writers and crew open up for negotiations here in the U.S. over the next two years need only look north of the border. There the Canadian union representing 21,000 domestitc performers are in tough bargaining with producers including many U.S. based companies like Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
Linked below is the union (ACTRA) website with an update. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting on the possibility of a strike (Actors Strike Looms in Canada). Interestingly, the contract under negotiation covers most of Canada but not British Columbia where Vancouver is located. B.C. performers are in a separate union with lower wages. And the producers are threatening – as they do in the U.S. to move production to B.C. from the rest of Canada. In light of intense concern in the U.S. about runaway production it is interesting to see that the ‘race to the bottom’ affects much of Canadian film and T.V. too. American EMI workers may be able to learn a great deal by paying close attention to the Canadian negotiations. And, of couse, support and solidarity for their fellow performers could go a long way to helping build a critical bridge with Canadian labor that could help in upcoming bargaining in the U.S.
Anyone looking to predict what negotiations are going to look like when the major collective agreements between actors, writers and crew open up for negotiations here in the U.S. over the next two years need only look north of the border. There the Canadian union representing 21,000 domesitc performers are in tough bargaining with producers including many U.S. based companies like Disney, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
Linked below is the union (ACTRA) website with an update. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting (Actors Strike Looms in Canada). Interestingly, the contract under negotiation covers all of Canada but not British Columbia where Vancouver is located. B.C. performers are in a separate union with lower wages. And the producers are threatening – as they do in the U.S. to move production to B.C. from the rest of Canada. In light of intense concern in the U.S. about runaway production it is interesting to see that the ‘race to the bottom’ affects much of Canadian film and T.V. too. American EMI workers may be able to learn a great deal by paying close attention to the Canadian negotiations. And, of couse, support and solidarity for their fellow performers could go a long way to helping build a critical bridge with Canadian labor that could help in upcoming bargaining in the U.S.
In light of intense interest among union activists in the EMI sector, I prepared the following post on the Change to Win union group that broke away from the AFL-CIO as well as on the new Industry Coordinating Committee that has been formed by the AFL-CIO in the arts, entertainment and media industry sector. It has also been posted in slightly different form on Actors Access, so I apologize for cross-postings! As always, comments and questions are welcome.
Background on the ICC and CtW
The core facts about the Change To Win (CtW) group are pretty well known. Assessing the real meaning or long-term impact of CtW is a bit harder. CtW is made up several major affiliates, with some 40% of the membership of the pre-split AFL-CIO, including SEIU, the Teamsters, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, the Carpenters and the Food and Commercial Workers.
In their own way and for their own reasons each of these affiliates was increasingly dissatisfied with their relationship with the AFL-CIO. If I was forced to choose one reason among many for that dissatisfaction I would likely say that each of those affiliates has been able to grow their membership in various ways over the past few years, largely because they organize workers in sectors of the economy that are not hurt as much by globalization. So, while the Steel Workers and the Auto Workers have been devastated by technological change and free trade, the Hotel Employees have seen huge job and membership growth in places like Las Vegas, while the SEIU has seen job and membership growth in janitorial work in office parks and cities. The strategy of concentrating on lower paid immigrant labor in the “new” service economy seemed to make sense to those affiliates poised to take advantage of it. That is more easily done by the Teamsters, for example, which has always been willing to organize workers outside its core jurisdiction, than the Auto Workers.
That core idea leads to the ICC debate. If you take the view that you can organize large numbers of workers in these new sectors of the economy you are less interested in the craft and other jurisdictional divisions in the labor movement. So Andy Stern at SEIU developed the idea that many current AFL affiliates should be merged out of existence. At one point he proposes merging all affiliates down to just six big unions. Of course, that has, I believe, terrible implications for union democracy. But Stern has shown little hesitation at forcing through mergers within SEIU so that, for example, the LA janitors were merged into a statewide janitors local with janitors in the Bay Area – coincidentally after a union election in LA put a more militant largely Hispanic group of activists in power who threatened then SEIU president John Sweeney and Stern, who was Sweeney’s number two guy.
When in 2005 it became clear that the idea of a breakaway was real, the AFL stalwarts recognized that they needed to respond. The idea of the ICC came out of the Teachers Union and made its way to the Executive Council where it was passed in 2005. It moves some way towards what Stern wanted but did not go far enough and so Stern and Hoffa left anyway. But the ICC idea was put in place. It does not mandate the formation of ICC’s – that was what bothered Stern. It says that affiliates can form an ICC if they want. If they do there is supposed to be some discipline to the grouping as the “binding” language in the ICC principles that some commentators have highlighted indicates.
However, the ICC idea is on paper and what happens in reality may be very different. There is actually already one ICC for nurses and health care workers (at least those that are left after the departure of the SEIU). And now there is the AEMI ICC. The AEMI ICC idea came out of the Department for Professional Employees, which is a semi-autonomous department within the complex AFL-CIO structure that is heavily influenced by the Teachers Union. S.A.G. is part of the DPE.
Of course, on paper the idea of a bigger stronger union in the entertainment industry makes sense if you are facing bigger stronger global corporations as well as Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But the challenge is not sacrificing the democratic participation of the rank and file membership in the process since after all that is what gives unions their real power and legitimacy. In addition, it is one thing to lump all janitors into a “one big union” but acting, writing, etc., are “skills” of a completely different order. And then there are the rich traditions and culture in the Guilds that gives them such significance. That is why I have suggested elsewhere that the devil is in the details of the ICC. Coordinating with the other affiliates, such as CWA and IBEW, could be very helpful in making sure the ICC hub responds to the needs of the spokes, as it were.
On the one hand, this article in today’s LA Times puts the spotlight precisely where it belongs in today’s EMI labor environment – on the impact that digital distribution is having, first, on corporate revenue models and, second, on the effect these changing models may have on income earned by workers in the heavily unionized EMI sector.
But notice what is missing! While employer representative Nicholas Counter slyly suggests that he shares the “fear” (“I feel your pain”?) of EMI labor caused by the “brave new world,” nowhere does the article point out that the uncertainty caused by the new technology has not stopped big players like Microsoft and Google and Disney from carving up the pie. And when Microsoft sat down with the studios earlier this year to carve out a deal for content to be provided by studios for its online presence they certainly had revenue projections available and engaged in some tough negotiations about how much of the pie would stay on the studio side and how much would stay on the distribution side!
Notice what the Times does – in the face of uncertainty it predicts, almost dares, EMI labor unions into a STRIKE! But if EMI labor can advance a strong argument about the value it creates for the entire EMI sector it can boost its power at the bargaining table and secure significant impact on revnue sharing. This may mean bringing more than just the producers to the table – after all, the real power is in the distribution side of the business as the experience with DVD’s proved. That is the real challenge in the next two years for the unions in this critical sector of the economy.
calendarlive.com: THE NATION – Residuals Debate: Old Script on New Set
Today’s New York Times reports on a dispute among major players in the rapidly changing world of television. It appears that noone really knows how to measure the impact of changing technology on advertising revenues. This is particularly intriguiing in light of internal political developments in the major union representing actors in the EMI sector, the Screen Actors Guild. Recall from earlier posts here that Guild President Alan Rosenberg took a huge political hit from erstwhile allies in the Guild’s more radical Membership First faction for backing an extension of the Guild’s collective bargaining agreement with the advertising industry pending the outcome of a two year study of change in the revenue modesl of the industry. If those who try to track the industry like Nielsen cannot agree on how to model the changes, what is the value of waiting two years to carve up the pie?
My most recent letter to the FT this time endorsing their call for a moratorium on the use of stock options as a form of compensation. While this may seem an extreme move to some, in light of the recent backdating scandal as well as the growing gap between senior insider pay and that of average workers, the call is long overdue.
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Letters – Healthy reminder of risks of stock options