Triage

By Laraine Newman

The hallmark of any bully, manipulator or sociopath for that matter, is to deny reality. Whether it be linking 9/11 to Iraq, claiming the Holocaust never happened…oh I could go on.  My first realization of this blatant denial style in politics was the Iran/Contra scandal.  Caught red handed, the strategy of the Reagan Administration was to just deny.  I was apoplectic at the notion.  I couldn’t believe it would stand. But a precedent was set. It reminded me of a Richard Pryor joke;  “even if your wife catches you in bed with another woman: deny”!

Generally, I imagine people are inclined to believe that actors have it easy and think that any struggle for fair pay is the obstreperous blather of a spoiled group of people. But, I’m not going to talk about the actors fight for residuals, even though Union busting is a frightening and nefarious trend in our country.

We, as actors, have a beast within.  Screen Actors Guild  (SAG) is pretty much at war with American Federation of Radio and Television Artists (AFTRA).

I’m going to say, at the outset, I’m in support of SAG. For the simple reason that AFTRA denies it’s culpability in every one of it’s undermining deeds.

Before I ever got involved in Union politics, my experience with AFTRA at that point had been 28 years of a minimum of a $200.00 difference.  SAG being the higher rate. Whenever my fellow actors or me discovered a job we were doing was AFTRA, there would be a collective groan of disappointment.  This, I might add, after a strike resolution years earlier where they agreed to stop underbidding our jobs.

Like the Bush Administration, whose sole purpose, (and believe me, as a rational being who realizes there HAS to be two sides to every story and has tried to find ONE GOOD THING they’ve done and COUDN”T,) is to serve their own agenda at any cost, AFTRA has weakened the position of actors by putting SAG in the position of having to police a union that’s supposed to be aligned with us, not competing. It is no longer a union, which serves the actors, but rather an enterprise that sells actors out for it’s own profit.

For the past 20 years, I’ve made a very good living in Animation.  About 4 years ago, unbeknownst to my fellow and me, actors working on several series for a studio I won’t name, a contract we thought was SAG was re-negotiated by AFTRA.  The name of this contract will go down in infamy: The Uptown Contract.  It not only took away our SAG day rate and replaced it was the crummy AFTRA rate, but the residual structure was appalling.  It pretty much amounted to NO residuals.  What was worse was that it would surely be chum in the water to other studios if we didn’t do something.

The animation actors rallied.  We held a meeting at AFTRA headquarters.  AFTRA justified its conduct by whimpering that if it hadn’t given in, the work would have gone to Canada.  It’s certainly true, that’s happened in the past, but their position reminded me of the guy with low self esteem who stays with the beautiful woman who treats him like shit, because he thinks he’s lucky to have her.  But that meeting managed to put a cork in any future would-be Uptown Contracts, even though we’re  living out this one to it’s full term: another year from now.

When faced with the daunting dilemma of these schisms, AFTRA often pays lip service to the desire to merge.  But all I see is encroachment into SAG domain.  What this has done is make it impossible for actors to earn enough to qualify for SAG’s outstanding health care program. Up until now I felt there had to besomething SAG could do to facilitate a merger. But I discovered that there were so many ancillary divisions of AFTRA that were pretty much obsolete, that our Union dues would go to support, among other problems, that again, considering the recalcitrance and denial on their part of undercutting our contracts, the idea of addressing those other problems seemed insurmountable.  I understand this Doug Allen guy is obnoxious and that can’t help. We’re in triage people.  There’s no merger in the near future and we’re going into negotiations in June.  AFTRA seems to be working alone.  If that’s not union busting, I don’t know what is.