Hollywood's two biggest unions to merge

An interesting article by David Macaray on Counterpunch.com about the proposed merger of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. SAG members are worried that their union will be diluted and marginalized.

Read it here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/20/hollywood%E2%80%99s-two-biggest-unions-set-to-merge/

From the article:

Both SAG and AFTRA negotiate with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers), which means the team that sits across the table from the union reps in a contract bargain, and argues with them about money and benefits, represents the interests of the producers. So it breaks down to the actors vs. the producers. The artists vs. the bean-counters. Management vs. Labor. Your classic dichotomy.

Except for one detail. Some of the most influential union members in Hollywood (Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro) happen to be producers themselves, which makes things more complicated. Another detail: Agents who represent the actors are allowed to have equity in the projects being discussed. In other words, an agent who’s paid to get an actor a fair price for a role in a movie is allowed to be a profit-taker in that same movie. Why isn’t that a conflict of interest?

...

But these anomalies are partly what make the entertainment conglomerates and the guilds affiliated with them so difficult to understand and navigate. And not to whine about the media, but they haven’t helped. In fact, they’ve been an impediment. In 2008, the media unfairly characterized SAG’s Membership First negotiators as “hard-liners,” which was not only inaccurate, but, sadly, unintentionally indicative of the depths to which people’s expectations have sunk. Apparently, we’ve reached the point where workaday actors asking wealthy Hollywood producers for a fair shake at the bargaining table makes them “hard-liners.”