The national executive committee of the Screen Actors Guild has voted to reject the recent deal negotiated for voicing video games, so you can ignore most of this item. Here's the latest news. This sounds like a major rift in the union that will lead to much yelling and little solidarity.
In other Hollywood labor news, the Writers Guild is making a major effort to organize the folks who write reality shows. Actually, there's an aspect of this story that's not being mentioned, which is that writers on reality shows were routinely covered by the WGA, once upon a time. I worked on a reality show in the eighties that was fully covered by the Guild. What happened over the years was that reality show producers started to realize they could avoid paying WGA rates for writers by not calling the people who were writing their shows "writers." They began calling them "segment producers" or "researchers" or some other title but still expecting these folks to create a script.
A lot of writers protested to the WGA. Some turned down such work because they didn't want to write without getting full guild benefits and protection and, of course, a writing credit. Others, for economic necessity, took those jobs but went to the Guild and said, "Can't you do something about this?" The problem was that the Guild didn't address it when it was a matter of two or three shows. The WGA covers a field of different writers doing different kinds of writing, and there's a kind of short-sighted democracy that causes it to ignore the issues that don't immediately impact the majority of members. Most WGA members do sitcoms, one-hour dramatic series or features, so those are the areas that receive most of the attention, and the needs of the game show writers and soap opera writers and variety show writers (and so on) get neglected. The reality show scam wasn't addressed for a long time because it didn't affect a lot of people…and now that it does, it's a more difficult problem to handle. One of these days, if and when variety shows make a big comeback, we're going to be in similar trouble. For over a quarter-century, variety show writers have been pointing out abusive employment practices in their area but since there have been so few of them, their grievances never became a high priority. Someday, when rectifying them will be more difficult, they'll be a major issue.