May 28, 2021
Today we’re going to talk about the benefits of a merger between AGMA and Actors’ Equity, but first a brief recap of earlier posts:
The four benefits most desired by workers from their unions are:
- Portable health (portable here means follows you wherever you work)
- Portable retirement
- Portable unemployment
- Job search assistance (for many of us, that means audition access)
All of the entertainment unions in the US have achieved all of these benefits for their members, except for AGMA, which has achieved NONE of these.
AGMA has failed to achieve these benefits for its members as a direct consequence of a soft coup d’état that took place between 1998 and 2000 to ensure that each individual shop would be able to bargain for its own concerns without coordination at the national level.
In the absence of national bargaining priorities, all of the infrastructure needed to provide portable benefits to members decayed and was dismantled, eventually giving rise to AGMA’s Benign Neglect policy.
After decades of Benign Neglect, AGMA has lost too much of its infrastructure to be able to rebuild and bargain for these benefits for all its members.
In order to make it possible for AGMA’s director and choreographer members to have uniform access to benefits, AGMA must cede jurisdiction over its stage director and choreographer members to the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), where all of the needed bargaining practices are already in place.
If stage directors and choreographers leave AGMA for the SDC, the workers represented by AGMA and the workers represented by Actors’ Equity become identical, making fruitful merger discussions between AGMA and Equity much more likely.
That’s our topic for today: AGMA’s chorister, dancer, soloist, stage manager and actor members would benefit tremendously if represented by a union formed of a merger between AGMA and Actors’ Equity.
Simply put, it checks all the boxes.
AGMA and Equity represent the same worker groups in similar professions in a similar work environment.
AGMA and Equity have a history of jurisdictional disputes that would be fully resolved by a merger.
Portable health? CHECK
Portable retirement? CHECK
Portable unemployment? CHECK (Equity actively fights misclassification to ensure access to unemployment benefits for its members.)
Job search assistance? CHECK (Equity auditions must be open to all Equity members on an equal basis.)
Also, Supplemental Workers’ Compensation? CHECK
Any merged union between AGMA and Equity would retain these essential characteristics of Actors’ Equity, and they would be of benefit to all of us.
Finally, since the labor movement is built on a foundational philosophy of strength in numbers, merger grows our size and thus our strength. This is why merger is regarded as the option to be ruled out before seeking other solutions. It isn’t the thing you try last when everything else has failed. It’s what you try FIRST, falling back on other solutions only if merger proves unattainable.
This was also AGMA’s approach for most of its history. AGMA was actively exploring merger possibilities from the 1940s until 2005. We’ve looked into mega mergers between all the entertainment unions and mergers with the AFM, AFRA, AFTRA and Equity over the years. Even if you hit stumbling blocks and personality clashes from time to time, it’s a door that should always be kept open and an exploration that should never cease. You keep bargaining and working through the problems until you get there.
This is the point I want to bring home: the fact that AGMA stopped all merger negotiations in 2005 and eliminated its Merger and Affiliation Committee in 2009 is DEEPLY WEIRD. It’s a complete about face that runs contrary to decades of precedent and practice. If AGMA is truly dedicated to ensuring a path to benefits for all of its members, it needs to get back to doing what it had always done until the coup.
Bargain in good faith for merger with Actors’ Equity. It’s the first, best and most obvious solution to AGMA’s protracted inability to provide portable benefits to its itinerant members while preserving and enhancing benefits for its full-time members.
