Actors union huddles over Hollywood labour stalemate

14/07/2008 06:22

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A day after their counterproposal to major studios’ "final" contract offer was rebuffed, Screen Actors Guild leaders huddled on Friday to consider their next move in a Hollywood labour stalemate almost certain to drag into next week.

In a brief statement released in the evening, SAG said its negotiating team "met behind closed doors throughout the day today discussing bargaining strategies. The negotiations team remains committed to continue to bargain for a fair contract."

But no further talks were scheduled, and SAG made no mention of how it might proceed to reopen negotiations now that management has taken the position that bargaining is over. It concluded by saying it would provide another update on Monday.

The contract at issue covers the work of 120,000 SAG members in prime-time TV and movies, an industry still reeling from a 100-day screenwriters’ strike that ended in February. A strike by the actors union was seen as unlikely, for now.

The old SAG contract expired hours after studios’ bargaining agent, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, presented the union their "final" offer as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition on June 30.

SAG nonetheless delivered a counteroffer during a four-hour meeting on Thursday that ended with the studios refusing .....continued below

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to budge and insisting that SAG submit the industry’s latest proposal to union members for a vote.

SAG leaders have so far been unwilling to do so, saying the studio offer -- mirroring terms endorsed on Tuesday by the smaller American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in a separate TV-only contract -- falls short in several areas.

SAG has, for example, sought higher residual payments for actors from DVD sales and to extend contract coverage to virtually all made-for-Internet programming.

The two sides even disagreed over whether they were still bargaining, or what constitutes a rejection.

"Our national negotiating committee did not, as has been erroneously reported, reject the AMPTP’s offer," SAG said in its statement on Friday. "Instead, we made a comprehensive counterproposal that adopted some of their proposals and offered alternatives on others."

But AMPTP spokesman Jesse Hiestand responded by saying, "The counterproposal to a final offer is a rejection to a final offer. It can’t be anything else."

Moreover, the studios again challenged SAG’s assertion that further deal-making was still possible, and they publicly released a transcript of what AMPTP executive Carol Lombardini told SAG on Thursday to make their point.

"What we gave you on June 30 was our final offer. It doesn’t get any better than that. This is the best deal you are going to achieve from us," she said.

Lombardini also raised the possibility that the souring economy might force the studios to scale back their terms if the offer languishes too long without approval.

How the status of talks is defined is more than academic. With the old contract now lapsed, the studios could declare a formal impasse in talks, freeing them to impose the terms of their latest offer, or to institute a lockout.

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