There is labor peace in Hollywood now, with one notable and sticky exception.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators reached a tentative deal for feature films and prime-time TV over the July 4 holiday with the major movie studios and networks. Pending its expected ratification, the agreement will cover the union's roughly 160,000 members and is in line with the pacts reached earlier by the directors and writers unions, each of which signed off on similar three-year deals which extend into 2020.
That leaves only the few thousand actors who supply the voices for video games on the outside looking in. They're getting familiar with that view because they've been on strike since last October, 260 days ago. And there are no new talks scheduled.
"I can't believe we're still fighting for this contract," said Keythe Farley, chairman of the union's negotiating committee. "I thought we'd be done by lunch on day one. I figured we were all eager to update the substandard, nearly 20-year-old contact that we're operating under."
Virtually all of the issues between the actors and the 11 largest video game producers were settled before the strike was called, with one exception. The union is insisting on establishing back-end residual payments for performers who work on games that sell more than 2 million units.
That would be a first for the video game industry, which generated an estimated $30 billion in the U.S. and more than $90 billion globally in 2016.
Negotiations collapsed and the strike began on Oct. 21 against 11 major video game producers: Insomniac Games; Warner Bros.; EA; Activision Publishing; Blindlight; Corps of Discovery Films; Disney Character Voices Inc.; Formosa Interactive LLC; Interactive Associates; Take 2 Interactive Software; and VoiceWorks Productions.
"What's frustrating for us is that the members voted to authorize the strike a week before we made our offer," said attorney Scott J. Witlin, a partner and head of the labor and employment law department at Barnes & Thornburg and chief negotiator for the companies. "The membership never got a chance to vote on our most recent offer."
The two sides came very close to an agreement on the issue, but figuring out what to call it was an issue. Seeking to set a precedent that might lead to residuals in future negotiations, the union asked for an upfront buyout of "secondary compensation" (i.e., residuals), but the companies refused to call it that. Instead, it offered a nearly identical proposal that it calls "additional compensation."