SAG-AFTRA Exec Calls A-Listers’ Bid to Help Settle Strike ‘A Gesture of Goodwill’ – Deadline

Josh Tillis for Deadline

The union’s chief negotiator says the plan proposed by George Clooney and other major stars this week to SAG-AFTRA to jump-start stalled negotiations with the studios “is worth reviewing and considering.”

“We’re with you, we’re behind you,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline today about his thoughts and feelings from the Oscar winner and others. “We just want to do whatever we can to help, and I think someone who wants to help is not someone who wants to undermine it.”

On Tuesday, as Deadline exclusively reported, Clooney, Emma Stone, Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry, Scarlett Johansson and other celebrities met with union bosses to discuss the state of the strike and the lack of talks with the studios. And in the Zoom meeting, as Clooney himself confirmed to Deadline exclusively today, representatives assured union president Fran Drescher and Crabtree-Ireland that “a lot of the highest earners want to be part of the solution.”

SAG-AFTRA has been on strike for 98 days so far, with no new talks with studios and streamers at this time. However, Crabtree-Ireland said today that a new contract was “certainly possible”. He added: As long as everyone returns to the table, and does so with the mentality of let’s find this path to a fair deal.

In the desire to get that fair deal, the top tiers had some details to put on the table for the guild to consider.

“We have offered to remove the dues cap, which would bring more than $50 million into the union annually,” the two-time Oscar winner Clooney explained of the stars’ proposals to bring the situation back to the negotiating table. “More than $150 million over the next three years. We think it’s fair for us to pay more to the union. We’re also proposing a bottom-up residual structure, meaning the top of the calling sheet will be the last to collect the residuals, not the first.” These negotiations will be ongoing, but we wanted to show that we are all in this together and find ways to help close the gap in actors getting paid.

On the picket lines at Warner Bros. on Thursday, Crabtree-Ireland took stock of the big picture of the A-lister’s offer.

“The idea of ​​raising our dues caps and providing more membership dues could help fund all kinds of programs that could help members, like programs to help uninsured members who need health insurance, or premium assistance or things like that,” The SAG-AFRTRA leader noted. “But that’s no way to put money into benefit plans. It’s not even legal to put money into benefit plans except from employer contributions.”

“So, I see this as a gesture of goodwill and support intended to help raise membership more than to influence contract negotiations,” he declared.

While dues were not a major topic in SAG-AFTRA deliberations this year, the celebrity idea of ​​overturning residual payments had the potential to carry real weight, symbolically if nothing else. In real terms, by putting themselves at the bottom and putting working actors at the top, the Clooney-led proposal could empower the vast majority of the union’s 160,000 members, many of whom don’t even earn enough to qualify for health. Care benefits

With Netflix’s Ted Sarandos repeatedly accusing SAG-AFTRA of wanting to impose a “subscription tax” on the deal, the guild’s revenue-sharing proposal was the most significant sticking point in reaching a new three-year contract. Since the start of talks earlier this year, the actors’ union has been seeking new financial compensation for the cast of hit shows and films — which was not always a start with the AMPTP.

In the latest round of talks that began on October 2, the union reduced the proposal from 2% of revenues to 1%. Last week, SAG-AFTRA returned with a revamped version that aims to simplify the amount to about 57 cents per subscriber on streaming services.

Things did not go well – in fact, on October 11, the studios and streamers left scheduled talks early and later contacted Crabtree-Ireland to say they would not be returning and that deliberations had been “put on hold”. AMPTP claimed the proposal would cost them $800 million a year and represent an “unsustainable economic burden.” SAG-AFTRA disputes this estimate, calling it inflated by hundreds of millions.

“They told us under no circumstances would we agree to anything that was revenue-related, so our committee went back, dug deep, worked hard for a few days, and came up yesterday with a new proposal that was not revenue-related, but rather revenue-related,” union chief negotiator Crabtree-Ireland told Deadline on 12 October on Netflix’s picket line: ‘They’ve reached subscriber levels exactly as they asked for.’ “Their response to that, instead of being, ‘Oh, this is something we can talk about,’ their response was, ‘We’re walking away from the negotiations.’

While talks have been put on hold by studios and streamers for over a week now, Netflix yesterday in its third-quarter earnings report described negotiations as “ongoing” — which could indicate a reboot is on the horizon sooner rather than later.