AFTRA offers early talks

Org targets SAG with offer to majors

By DAVE MCNARY

Taking the offensive in its brutal divorce battle with the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists aims to beat SAG to the negotiating table: It'll launch talks with the majors for primetime TV work by early March.

"We have told the companies we will be ready to go at the start of next month," AFTRA national exec director Kim Roberts Hedgpeth told Daily Variety on Sunday, a day after AFTRA's national board approved a resolution to move ahead without SAG.

The AMPTP had no comment about the AFTRA move, but it's likely that the companies will take the union up on its invitation. The majors are, not surprisingly, much more eager to negotiate a deal with AFTRA than with SAG, the WGA's closest ally during the three-month writers strike -- particularly after SAG prexy Alan Rosenberg and exec director Doug Allen recently decried the DGA's tentative deal.

"We felt what SAG did, while the DGA deal was still out for ratification, was completely inappropriate," Hedgpeth said.

The current SAG-AFTRA contract covering work by actors in features and primetime expires June 30. If primetime negotiations with AFTRA begin without SAG, the SAG-AFTRA divorce would become official in that it would unquestionably end the "Phase I" agreement on joint negotiations that's been in effect since 1981.

SAG has about 120,000 members working in film, TV and commercials, while AFTRA has 70,000 including actors, broadcasters, singers, dancers and announcers. About 40,000 thesps are dual cardholders. Projects shot for film are generally under SAG's jurisdiction; those shot to tape are AFTRA's. But the growing use of digital media is blurring those lines.

An AFTRA primetime deal would have profound implications for actors even though it covers only a handful of primetime programs (CBS' "Rules of Engagement," Fox's "'Til Death," ABC's "Cashmere Mafia") and no feature work.

Under such a deal, it would be able to lure producers of new shows to sign at lower rates than SAG's -- which could provoke SAG to retaliate by telling its 120,000 members not to work on AFTRA shows or starting to sign up shows in AFTRA's traditional jurisdiction such as soaps and talkers.

For its part, SAG responded Sunday by blaming AFTRA for the breakup and accusing AFTRA of being undemocratic, noting that SAG has scheduled a referendum asking members to approve ending Phase I, with ballots to be sent out Feb. 15 and due back by March 31.

But Hedgpeth and AFTRA prexy Roberta Reardon said it's irrelevant what SAG wants since it violated Phase I by instituting bloc voting among its negotiating committee members.

"AFTRA has a responsibility to move forward and negotiate our agreement for primetime network TV dramatic programming," Reardon said. "We cannot abdicate our fiduciary obligations to AFTRA members by allowing another institution to dictate the terms of our longstanding contracts or control our negotiating timeline."

In response, Rosenberg said AFTRA is lying.

"AFTRA is free to end our joint bargaining relationship, but they cannot excuse that action by saying that SAG has done anything to abrogate Phase I. That is simply untrue," he added. "We are at this very moment engaged in an effort to put the question of our joint bargaining relationship to a vote of the SAG membership, a democratic courtesy AFTRA does not afford their members."

Although the two unions have launched their "wages and working conditions" meetings to seek member input, signs of divorce have already emerged. Those confabs, formerly termed "joint meetings," are now described by AFTRA as "co-hosted."

And though the brawl between the two performers unions has gone mostly unnoticed during the WGA strike, SAG and AFTRA have gone to the mat during the past year on a variety of topics.

SAG's beef with AFTRA stems from the latter's refusal to reduce its 50-50 participation on the negotiating committees for film-TV and on commercials -- despite accounting for less than 10% of the earnings. In addition, SAG complained that AFTRA has been offering producers cheaper contracts in basic cable.

AFTRA has accused SAG leaders of being "radical" and inflexible, asserting that its "one size fits all" approach to contracts is resulting in fewer union jobs as producers shoot in Canada or go non-union.

SAG members outside of Hollywood have been supportive of AFTRA. And the unions also remain at odds over how to resolve jurisdictional disputes.

AFTRA also announced Sunday that it's been awarded a direct charter with the AFL-CIO, asserting it will make it easier to work with other AFL-CIO unions such as the Communications Workers of America, IATSE and American Federation of Musicians. Reardon said the charter means that the AFL-CIO will resolve jurisdictional disputes involving AFTRA rather than the Associated Actors and Artistes of America.

But Rosenberg responded by saying that AFTRA's affiliation has a key condition that AFTRA continue to belong to the Associated Actors and Artistes of America and settle jurisdictional fights through that org.