Hollywood Shuts Down After 160,000 Actors Walk Off the Set
Hollywood Shuts Down After 160,000 Actors Walk Off the Set
Hollywood Shuts Down After 160,000 Actors Walk Off the Set
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Personally I think actors and writers are overpaid, but I support their right to strike. I also support the studios avoiding the strike by avoiding all SAG actors and other guilds because like I don’t think they’re that much better than non-union members
One of the main features of this strike is the companies are trying to get extras to sign away their likenesses. The companies then intend to use their likenesses "for eternity and in every universe" (the actual wording) as computer generated images to abolish their jobs entirely. Actors are not particularly happy about the attempt to get them to do work that will abolish their own existence, and the higher paid actors see it as inevitable that this expands to include them to if they don't fight it now.
There is nobody avoiding the strike at this point. Everything has ground to a halt. If anything starts again the guilds for crews, camera operators etc are planning to join.
I do agree that it’s bullshit to pressure actors into signing away their likeness and knew this was a main feature, but SAG is joining the wave that WAG started and I don’t support increasing their residuals. WAG and SAG are basically the cool kids club of landed gentry. I believe people should be able to form unions to pursue self interests, but that doesn’t mean I blindly support every union strike.
Regarding union strikes, I personally don’t get why sanitation workers don’t strike to get a lot more money, they certainly deserve it.
Regarding union strikes, I personally don’t get why sanitation workers don’t strike to get a lot more money, they certainly deserve it.
Mostly caused by a lack of radical leadership. You tend to find the unions getting shit done have reds running them, often from groups like the IWW or other entryist parties or salters (Chris Smalls amazon union are leninists and it took an absolutely massive salting effort to achieve), doing work in this space is extremely difficult because entrenched liberals are do-nothings and shifting them out of leaderships is not simple as reaching workers and convincing them that the leadership is trash is a lot of long and very hard effort that often requires salting the workplace as well.
So tldr it's about getting the people that want to stir shit up into those leadership positions and those people aren't liberals.
What does salter mean in this context?
Salting is where many people join a company specifically with the goal of organising it and forming unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_(union_organizing)
These people will then work as organised cells within companies to spread propaganda and shift the rest of the workers towards a position that will result in an eventual successful union vote.
The super famous ones do but for every one of them there are thousands of poorly paid ones. What the studios are doing would remove the possibility of even becoming well paid in the future. These strikes are about helping the people not at the top, and about protecting their upward mobility.
You need to remember that this isn't just about people at the top. Day players get $1000 a day for what can be a 20-hour day for a two-week shoot and then get nothing for a few months. They barely qualify for health insurance, which is often the reason they do it. They are, if anything underpaid.
Yes, there are extremely wealthy SAG-AFTRA members. There are also SAG-AFTRA members living in one-bedroom apartments.
The median income of SAG-AFTRA members is under $26K a year. A tiny, tiny percentage of actors are what you would call rich or even well off. Most have a second job and still struggle to pay rent.