THEY'RE ALL COMING BACK
'The Jeff Probst Show' Has Been Canceled
The SAG strikes back
by Danny Gallagher, posted Dec 11th 2008 11:02AM
Remember the good old days when dock workers, air traffic controllers, teachers, and strike placard makers went on strike? Good, hard-working people who didn't make much money but put their bodies and well-being on the line every day to improve themselves and their community. In exchange, they received measly little things like health insurance, safe work conditions, and a vending machine in the break room that didn't eat quarters, dollars or fingers. Those Norma Rae days are long gone. Now the only strikes we hear about are ones like the latest looming threat of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild, according to Reuters.
It's not that I don't feel sorry for SAG members or that I'm against their plight. Just about every industry in America has greedy CEOs who take as much as they can from as many as they can, all under the guise of performance and production bonuses earned by not running the company into Hell. It just feels like it could not have come at a worse time.
SAG (motto: We're not a jock manufacturing company) could be asked to take to the picket lines and walk off the job just as the economy's ever-increasing death reach stretches from coast to coast. So, not only will they have to fight for what they deserve, but they'll also have to do it when prices are high and jobs are scarce. That's a big death card in the CEO's tarot deck.
Just like the writer's strike last year, actors wants a fair share of Internet revenue profits for their work. Alan Rosenberg, president of the SAG, said eight of the major CEOs didn't even bother to show up to the mediation table to talk about it. They just took out a huge opposition ad in the Los Angeles Times in the hopes they could sweep strike talks under the rug because newspapers are only being used for oil changes and oven cleanings instead of viable news sources these days.
"How can we get a deal when CEOs hide behind a newspaper ad rather than engage us in constructive dialogue?" Rosenberg said in a video announcement on SAG's non-jock manufacturing related website.
So the strike deadline is January 2, 2009. If 75 percent of the membership vote "yes" instead of "no" or "Pat Buchanan," they walk. And so could some of your precious little TV shows while actors and their kind are starving and spending their last pennies on posterboard and custom printed T-shirts.
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