New Thinking Needed in Strike

There hasn’t been much public engagement in the national Screen Actors Guild strike against the ad industry. It simply doesn’t carry the social-justice impact of Los Angeles’ janitors strike or the potential for public disruption of a bus drivers strike. But when bargaining resumes Wednesday, both sides need to get off the dime, in part because of the economic consequences of production work leaving the region and the direct harm to daily production workers: prop and wardrobe people, electricians, carpenters and others who had no say in starting the 4-month-old strike and have no say in whether to continue it.

Economist Jack Kyser has estimated the revenue lost in Los Angeles County so far at $165 million. Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, are gaining lots of work at Hollywood’s expense. It’s clear that everyone in the business is sick of the strike--producers, for instance, want to get back to working with their production crews here.

Previous efforts to restart bargaining have failed instantly; SAG complains that the ad agencies and advertisers refuse to budge from their demand to switch the current residual payment scheme to a flat-rate deal, and the advertisers say the union is unrealistic. Both sides have to bring some new thinking to the table. It’s a new broadcast advertising industry, restructuring around cable and now entering the unknown territory of the Internet. If this relatively small strike can’t be settled to both sides’ profit, and soon, Los Angeles is in for a body blow next year when the Writers Guild and feature actors’ contracts come up for renewal in May and June. Those could make the current strike look like economic peanuts.