Taking It to the Streets

by Rachael Seymour

As a newly elected member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) board of directors and Los Angeles strike captain during last year’s commercial actors’ strike, I watched the Harvard students’ “living wage” protest from a new perspective. Breakthroughs in racial issues notwithstanding, civil disobedience, street protests, and general media-attracting actions appeared to be at best a clumsy, ineffectual, and time-consuming method of resolving contractual differences, and at worst, a deal-breaking, enmity-engendering exercise that erodes one’s bargaining position.

However, I felt duty bound to walk the picket line and engage in nonunion, commercial production-disrupting activities during the six-month actors’ strike against advertising agencies. The advertising agencies wanted to end the system of paying actors each time their commercials air on network TV and refused to extend this “pay per play” format to cable TV.

As I paced Hollywood’s sandal-melting sidewalks carrying a picket sign that read, “It Pays to Advertise, But Advertisers Won’t Pay!” and shouted “pay per play” with my fellow actors, while LA police and occasionally Secret Service officers kept a semblance of order, I had an epiphany.

In my foreign policy coursework at the Kennedy School, I learned that deterrence = strength x perceived resolve: for maximum bargaining leverage, your adversary must be aware of your arsenal — and believe that you are willing to use it.

The advertisers dared the actors to strike, not because they believed that a walkout would have little effect on their bottom line (both advertisers and actors are estimated to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars during the six-month strike), but because they did not believe that union actors had the resolve to turn down paid — albeit nonunion — commercial work. They were wrong. The problem was that it took half a year for the message to resonate. Had the advertisers understood how resolute the union actors were in declining nonunion commercial work during the strike, it is doubtful that the work stoppage would have occurred.

How does a bargaining unit display resolve? As in the case with the Harvard student protestors, it often entails actions far from the negotiating table. Staging student protests in the Yard had garnered media attention. Media coverage can increase public pressure on one side or the other, and sometimes both. In the case of the actors, we were at a clear disadvantage in the media war, however, as the LA Times, the City of Angel’s main daily newspaper, was also an advertiser we were picketing. Coverage of our rallies was often relegated to the obituary page, if they showed up in print at all. SAG and its sister union, AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), also staged many site protests that disrupted filming of commercials with noise, signs, and even soap bubbles.

While the monetary cost of delaying or canceling commercial shoots was significant, it wasn’t the goal and did not cause a crippling financial blow to the advertisers. Yet by appearing unexpectedly at shoot locations throughout Los Angeles and the rest of the nation, thereby forcing producers to adjust for the disturbances, the union actors were able to demonstrate their resolve and enter negotiations with more power.

The flaw in the Harvard protest, however, was the fact that the people displaying resolve were not part of the collective bargaining unit that negotiates for improved wages. The students were behaving much like a sympathetic union. That the protest will have no impact on upcoming bargaining sessions, as some administrators have stated, is not accurate either. The residual media scrutiny that is sure to linger long after the students hit the showers will no doubt influence the final offer to the workers.

SAG and AFTRA recently completed negotiations with the Alliance for Motion Picture and Television Producers over our television and theatrical (film) contract. Last year, SAG members earned more than $600 million for work in television and more than $400 million for work in feature films, so this three-year contract is extremely important to all actors.

Since the last contract negotiation started with a strike, the press has speculated for months that the actors are likely to do the same this summer, threatening work on your favorite TV shows and postponing film production. Even LA Mayor Richard Riordan commissioned a Milken Institute report that estimated that a prolonged actor and writer strike could cost Los Angeles $4.4 billion, the cash equivalent of the output from every casino and hotel in Las Vegas for more than half a year. The Writers Guild’s contract expired May 1, 2001. They
successfully negotiated a new contact without striking.

The fact is, however, because we demonstrated our resolve to “the Industry,” actors come to the bargaining table in a much better position. The “S” word had not been uttered by a SAG board member’s lips, and we believed that there was a deal to be made. We were right.

Putting the controversy over the duration of last year’s strike aside, I believe that civil disobedience, street protests, rallies, and picket lines that actors engaged in put the union in a stronger bargaining position this year.

Thanks to the wonderful coursework on campaigning taught by the Kennedy School’s Phil Sharp and Mickey Edwards, I landed a three-year term on SAG’s board of directors, despite competing against an unprecedented number of “high-profile” actors who also threw their hats into the ring. I am now using my public policy skills to tackle this issue and the many other challenges that face actors today: films leaving the United States for cheaper venues, agents attempting to own production companies, salary compression, and diversity issues, for example. Let’s hope my resolve will help in finding a solution to these issues.

Alaskan native and KSG graduation class marshal Racheal Seymour MPP 1997 is a former CIA political analyst who has appeared in several TV pilots and movies, including Singles and A Civil Action. She is a member of Women in Film, an LA-based nonprofit that supports women in the entertainment industry and can currently be seen on Lifetime television’s “Strong Medicine.”