SAG-AFTRA‘s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland was very circumspect today onstage at CES about upcoming contract negotiations with the studios and streamers and who will or should own Warner Bros. Yet, when it came to his labor big stick, the actor’s guild National Executive Director was extremely blunt, sorta.
“I want to be crystal clear, we are not going to accept a deal that is not fair to our members,” the union chief unsurprisingly said Thursday at the Las Vegas confab as painful memories of the 2023 picket lines were in the air. “There is no reason there should need to be a strike because these companies should come to the table in good faith, as we are.”
Then DCI tossed a grenade into the AMPTP mix: “I am certainly not going to rule out a strike. A strike is a possibility.”
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With the hurt the long labor action of 2023 brought to all sides of the table in hindsight, the 170,000-strong union NED then took a step back from his own blast: “But with a start on February 9, with weeks and weeks of time for us to negotiate, there is no reason we shouldn’t be able to reach a deal.”
In an unusual timeline for Tinseltown talks and ages before its current contract expires on June 30, SAG-AFTRA this year is going first in talks with the now Greg Hessinger-led Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Trying not to walk into anything stinky, Crabtree-Ireland sidestepped any real discussion of the expanded contract the AMPTP is seeking and the millions for guild Health plans, that Deadline exclusively reported on last month, the studios and streamers are intending to offer as a trade-off.
Of course, DCI didn’t deny any of that, but punted he couldn’t “respond to a non-proposal” – which is what you do in such circumstances.
For cover, the SAG-AFTRA top negotiator, as he was in 2023, insisted rather bureaucratically that SAG-AFTRA hasn’t received any formal pitches from ex-SAG boss and old pal Hessinger yet. Still, with the sides clearly taking going into next month’s talk, Crabtree-Ireland was playing to a measured definition of communication, members in the Vegas audience, and ghosting the realpolitick backchannel back and forth of bargaining points.
The notion of a five-year contract as opposed to the current format of three-years that the AMPTP are looking for in the name of “stability, as one source said in December, is not going away – especially with the sweetner of a $110 million dollar infusion into the unstable-to-varying-degrees “Cadillac” (as Ken Ziffren put it so poetically) Health plans of each guild.
Then again, having made AI such a focal point in the long long days of the summer of strikes three years ago, it was tech not talks that Crabtree-Ireland really wanted to discuss in Sin City, sorta.