Like its sister labor organization did several months ago, SAG officers used the guild’s national magazine last week to voice their support for merger with AFTRA.
However, the encouragement from national president Ken Howard, secretary-treasurer Amy Aquino and national executive director David White was mixed in with the dissonant voice of first VP Anne-Marie Johnson, who used her column to label merger talk as “premature and presumptuous.”
In recent months, the upper elected ranks of both the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Radio and TV Artists have endorsed the merger of their respective performer-based labor organizations.
However, merger will require a 60 percent vote by the membership bodies of both groups.
With SAG voters failing to meet that threshold at two previous attempts at merger, in 1999 and 2003, Johnson’s position indicates there’s still a portion of SAG membership that isn’t down with the plan.
For his part, Howard used his column to summarize the improvement in SAG-AFTRA relations, which have warmed significantly in two years, to the point in which the two groups are now jointly conducting a wages-and-working-conditions process in the run-up to joint negotiations for a new prime-time TV deal.
“The inefficiency of funding separate organizations to provide essentially the same service is yet another costly problem,” he wrote. “It must be addressed … Since I became SAG president, countless members have asked when we will achieve the goal of a single union for performers.”
Added Aquino: “From a financial perspective, there’s no question in my mind that pooling our resources and eliminating duplication of expenses by forming one performers’ union is the only way to maximize the value of every dues dollar we pay.”
