Union Leaders Blame Biden-Era Inflation Among Reasons for Historic Hollywood StrikePaul Bois 14 Jul 2023
The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) authorized a strike on Thursday, with some union leaders blaming the Biden-era inflation as one of their main issues.
The strike will be going into effect at midnight after the union’s 160,000 members voted overwhelmingly to authorize shutting down the industry and join the WGA in their ongoing strike against the AMPTP. During a press conference on Thursday, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director of the union and the chief negotiator, said that crippling inflation has put actors in a difficult financial position that studios have not aided.
Crabtree-Ireland said the studio streaming model has “undercut performers’ residual income and high inflation has further reduced our members’ ability to make ends meet.”
“To complicate matters further, actors now face an existential threat to their livelihoods with the rise of generative AI (artificial intelligence) technology,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “We proposed contract changes that addressed these issues, but the AMPTP has been uninterested in our proposals.”
Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, also said that the “eyes of the world and particularly the eyes of labor are upon us.”
“What happens here is important because what’s happening to us is what’s happening across all fields of labor by means of when employers make Wall Street and greed their priority and they forget about the essential contributors that make the machine run,” Drescher said.
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https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/07/14/sag-aftra-leaders-blame-biden-era-inflation-for-hollywood-strike/
