As SAG-AFTRA Dispute Rages, AFL-CIO Unable to Broker Truce

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003788147

April 10, 2008
By Andrew Salomon

On March 29, the day the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Screen Actors Guild were scheduled to ratify a joint bargaining proposal for a new TV and film contract, news broke that some cast members of The Bold and the Beautiful wanted to remove AFTRA as the show's union and have SAG bargain for them instead.

Partially as a result, AFTRA decided to suspend its joint bargaining agreement with SAG, known as Phase One, and negotiate a new prime-time network television contract independently for the first time in almost three decades. AFTRA's talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers will start April 28, about two weeks after SAG starts its negotiations.



In the week that followed a potentially historic breakup, officials from each union continued the debate over blame and motives. AFTRA contends that the conflict over the daytime drama is part of a larger plan by SAG to poach its shows; SAG sees it as a jerry-built excuse by AFTRA to opt out of Phase One. Meantime, the AFL-CIO, the organization in the best position to settle this fight and the much larger one besides, has been unable to broker a truce, while some 44,000 performers who belong to both SAG and AFTRA might wonder what kind of contracts the labor groups can secure working separately.

Charges of Raiding

Susan Flannery, who has been on The Bold and the Beautiful for 21 years, has been cited in news reports as one of the cast members behind the move to replace AFTRA with SAG. (She has been unavailable to comment since the story broke.) But Holter Graham, president of AFTRA's New York local, doubts Flannery was the instigator. "She wakes up on Tuesday morning at 9:15 and all of a sudden she understands the decertification process?" Graham asked rhetorically. "It just raises questions."

AFTRA national president Roberta Reardon went a step further, saying that SAG has made disparaging remarks about AFTRA for a year or more, and "all of these are precursors to a raid, frankly.... Raiding is the cardinal sin of the labor movement. Go out and organize. Don't do it by raiding an already organized unit. It's one thing if there's a new show and one of us covers it. It's another thing for a union to have a contract and another to try to decertify it."

SAG president Alan Rosenberg, however, denied that his union is raiding and sees the dispute over The Bold and the Beautiful as a ruse for AFTRA to get out of Phase One, which he maintains AFTRA has wanted to do for some time. "The Bold and the Beautiful has nothing to do with this," he said. "Even if we're wrong here -- which we're not -- even if we wanted to raid soap operas, we would have done it a long time ago. We wouldn't have done it two weeks before the negotiations."

FULL story at link.