Negotiations over Hollywood's last unfinished labor agreement are coming down to the wire, with a little more than two weeks left before the studios' contract with the Screen Actors Guild expires. So it's a particularly bad time for the long-simmering feud between SAG and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to boil over. Leaders of SAG have been bashing the tentative deal that AFTRA's negotiating team struck with the studios May 28. They sent an e-mail to members (about 44,000 of whom are also in AFTRA) outlining the deal's shortcomings, saying its sister union fell short on salaries, residuals for new media and DVDs, and compensation for product placement. They also approved a $75,000 budget to fight the AFTRA deal and later held a rally and a town hall meeting with members to stoke opposition.
The clash caps an unusually acrimonious year for SAG, which represents movie and prime-time television actors, and AFTRA, which represents mainly cable TV, talk-show and radio performers. The latter decided to end almost three decades of joint negotiations with SAG after the guild allegedly helped actors on a daytime drama try to switch unions. SAG sat down first with the studios but was unable to reach a deal in lengthy talks. AFTRA then stepped in, reaching a contract that hewed closely to the ones already agreed to by the writers and directors guilds.
