In the last month or so, Show Business seemed to have forgotten that the Screen Actors Guild is still working without a contract. Just to refresh our memory: The customary joint negotiations of SAG and AFTRA splintered this year and each went it alone. This is like if you and I had a tradition of doing well as partners in a three-legged race and we suddenly decided to split up and each run on a leg-and-a-half.
AFTRA made a tepid deal. The studios have taken the position that SAG can have essentially the same terms or they can rot but that there will be no further negotiations. And that's how it's been for months…up until the other day when the SAG Negotiating Committee decided it wants a strike authorization vote. Sadly, it sounds to me like they're doing this because they simply don't know what else to do. In a way, they're passing the buck to the union's national Board of Directors which now must decide if it will authorize such a vote.
Obviously, it's a bad time to ask the membership to threaten a walkout. I've seen no enthusiasm for it…and there wasn't even any before we started waking up to Today's Bank Failure on our homepages. A strike vote might pass but it would be like 55% or 60% so what's the point? A general rule o' thumb is that you need 80%+ to have an effective strike. If SAG voted 60% to go out, the AMPTP could just announce, "Okay, if you vote to accept our last offer, we'll throw in a free t-shirt…but this deal is only good for 48 hours." If they said that, the vote would swing the other way in a jif. Or they could just "wait out" the strike and it would collapse in two or three weeks. That would cost the studios some money — certainly more than giving away t-shirts — but they might swallow that loss in order to really humiliate a labor organization and scare others.
I feel terrible about this because I'm a big supporter of the local labor guilds and unions, and I think what SAG has been asking for is more than reasonable. But it's one of those situations where anything less than total pessimism strikes me as unwarranted optimism.