7 Days of Deals

DEAL OF THE WEEK: What A SAG-AFTRA Merger Means For Actors: It took nearly a century, but film and television actors might finally be close to joining forces in a single union. A joint committee's Jan. 16 completion of a merger proposal between SAG and AFTRA — led by presidents Ken Howard and Roberta Reardon, respectively — is expected to lead to board approval, followed by member voting in March. Guild observers already are debating what the merged entity, to be called simply SAG-AFTRA and to be led initially by both Howard and Reardon, will mean for rank-and-file actors. Beyond eliminating the guilds' overlapping jurisdiction over television and new media, a key benefit, supporters argue, would be that more actors will reach the qualifying income thresholds for pension and health coverage when their work is no longer split between competing unions. That probably will be true, but not until the guilds' pension and health plans also merge — a separate process, since the plans are legally distinct from the guilds themselves. The proposal has so far generated widespread support among the 125,000 SAG members and the 77,000 AFTRA card-holders (about 44,000 hold dual memberships), but a small group of ardent merger opponents in the SAG Hollywood division counter that the new pension and health plans are destined to be worse than the existing SAG plans. However, it's not obvious why this would be so: Federal law provides certain protections in the pension arena, and beyond that, the issue is shrouded in economic uncertainty. Wages and residuals won't change, at least until the current contracts expire: March 2013 for the commercials agreement and June 2014 for TV/theatrical. The latter will be a nail-biter negotiation, with the studios and the combined guild likely to begin jostling for position when talks start in fall 2013. Will a combined union automatically be invincible at the bargaining table? No, warns union merger expert Gary Chaison: "Anyone who expects a revolutionary change in labor relations will be disappointed." — Jonathan Handel