<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>I heard the agreement was reported as "tentative"... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Such agreements are
always describe as tentative. Since there are over 100,000 members of AFTRA and SAG, they obviously can't all be at the negotiating table. This applies to most union negotiations:
The negotiating is done by a committee from the unions and a similar committee from the networks and studios. (Sometimes the elected officers of the union are also members of the committeee either by appointment or
ex officio, sometimes not.) Once the two committees have hammered out an agreement they think is acceptable, it has to be approved by others.
In the case of the American Motion and Picture and Television Producers that mean each individual studio and network must vote on the pact, presumably with a majority winning.
In the case of SAG and AFTRA the means each union's executive board must approve the pact and agree to submit it to the membership at large for a vote. The members themselves then vote and the majority decides the issue.
So in theory each side has at least one more chance to reject the new contract (the actors have two) and nothing is final until all the votes are tallied. (Which will take several weeks, since once the two boards sign off on the deal they have to print ballots, mail them to over 100,000 members and allow time for the members to vote and mail the ballots back.) The Writer's Guild deal was agreed upon in early May, but it wasn't officially ratified until mid-June, when the ballots were counted.
As a practical matter the SAG/AFTRA boards are almost certainly going to endorse the new contract and the membership is almost certainly going to vote for it. Nobody was pressing for a strike. They hadn't even made preparations for a strike-authorization vote from the members - another process that takes weeks to complete and which they would have started a long time before the contract if there had been strong pro-strike sentiment among the union members.
With the soft economy nobody wants to do any more damage to the entertainment industry and the Los Angeles economy than has already been done by the mere threat of simultaneous actor and writer walk-outs.
(Some of the smaller FX houses and other industry subcontractors will not survive the current slump. The studios rushed to complete films ahead of the strike deadline. Nobody wants to start shooting anything new until the SAG/AFTRA deal is ratified, so there is very little post-production work in the pipeline right now. There won't be again until several months after production ramps up. Some companies can't survive six months without income, and that's what they're facing.)
Regards,
Joe
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Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division
joseph-demartino@att.net
