By James B. Parks

Peter Onorati is not a household name, but most television viewers would recognize his face. The 49-year-old actor appeared twice last year on the prime time television show “American Dreams,” once on “Monk” and once on “Providence.”

	Tuned into unions: Television actor Peter Onorati says entertainment professionals "depend on our unions to protect us."

Those were great jobs, Onorati says, but they are few and far between. “We are lucky to have jobs when we do. You may act in a series for a long time, but then if it’s canceled, you may not work again for years. I have a friend, a director, who has not worked for 18 months.

It’s great to be a celebrity, but celebrity doesn’t pay the medical bills or your kid’s school,” he says. “That’s why we have to depend on our unions to protect us.”

The entertainment industry is one of the most unionized in the country. Entertainment—film, musical recordings and performances, TV productions, videos and stage plays—is the nation’s second largest export, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Unions represent workers in every aspect of entertainment—from the superstar movie actors, what the industry calls “above the line” workers, to a host of people behind the scenes (“below the line”) workers, who operate cameras and sound equipment, make costumes, apply makeup, sell tickets and build sets.

The musicians in many popular bands and symphonic orchestras are union members, as are the members of the U.S. Marine Band who play at the White House. So are the sound and lighting and stage setup crews for musical and theatrical productions and radio announcers, commercial voice-over artists, writers and truck drivers who haul sets.

	"Malcolm in the Middle" star Jane Kaczmarek says without unions, "producers would get away with murder."

Nearly a dozen unions are involved in the entertainment industry, representing more than 400,000 members. “The entertainment industry is vital to the economic and cultural life of the nation,” says Paul Almeida, president of the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). “Yet despite the stardom and wealth enjoyed by a very few performing artists, the majority of these workers confront—and have always confronted—problems of chronic unemployment, underemployment, minimal health insurance and poor working conditions. In response to these problems, performing artists were among the first professionals to organize successfully on an occupationwide basis.”

Says Jane Kaczmarek, star of Fox TV’s “Malcolm in the Middle” and a Screen Actors board member: “There are two kinds of people—people who want to work hard and those who take advantage of them. Were it not for the union demanding fair wages and conditions, producers would get away with murder.”

Making ends meet

Like workers everywhere, most entertainment workers are just making ends meet. The DPE estimates the average annual salary of members of SAG and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists ranges between $14,000 and $16,000. At any one time during a year, DPE reports, 75 percent to 80 percent of actors, musicians and stage performers are unemployed. Television and radio stations, networks, publishers and other media outlets laid off 11,516 workers between January and November of last year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm.

	A lot in common: "The vast majority of members are not stars, but face the same problems as other working families," says AFTRA President John Connolly.

“We love our stars in music, in acting and on the news. Yet the vast majority of members are not stars, but regular people who face the same problems as other working families,” says AFTRA President John Connolly.

The lack of steady, dependable employment makes workers in the entertainment industry vulnerable to the same problems many temporary and part-time workers face, including reduced retirement and health care benefits. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years,” Kaczmarek says, “and ‘Malcolm’ is the first full-time job I’ve ever had.” Before she and her husband, actor Bradley Whitford, one of the stars of “The West Wing,” regularly starred on prime time, she says they always were anxious when out of work.

“We never went on vacation, we never invested—we were afraid we might not be able to pay the mortgage.”

Health care a key issue

Gene Maxwell doesn’t know if he will ever be able to retire. The 49-year-old radio engineer has worked for ABC Inc. for 27 years. For the first 15 years, he was assured of health care benefits when he retired. But in 1989, ABC’s parent Capital Cities discontinued medical benefits for retirees—giving Maxwell common cause with steelworkers, machinists and retirees in a variety of industries in which employers are reneging on promises to provide health care coverage.

	Retirement insecurity: Disney, ABC's owner, discontinued retiree health coverage for long-time ABC Radio employee such as Gene Maxwell.

“I’m either going to have to retire and then find another job that will give me health benefits or I’ll have to keep working until I qualify for Medicare. At least I’ll have that,” says Maxwell, who this year was elected president of NABET-CWA Local 16 in New York City.

The current owner, Disney Co., also is shifting the cost of coverage to its employees, Maxwell says. Since 2000, employee premiums have jumped by almost 70 percent, he says. For prescription drugs, the costs for employees rose Jan. 1 from $6 for generic and $12 for brand name drugs to $10 for generic and $20 plus 10 percent of the actual cost for brand.

Maintaining health care benefits and avoiding employers’ attempts to shift premium costs to workers was a major issue in the Theatrical Stage Employees’ negotiations with Hollywood producers last year. The issue will come up again this year in talks between IATSE and several Broadway producers, says Anthony DePaulo, business manager for IATSE Local 1 in New York City.

The cost of health care looms as a major bargaining issue for all unions this year. On average, companies nationwide increased workers’ monthly premiums by 27 percent for single coverage and 16 percent for family coverage between 2001 and 2002, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Those cost increases hit entertainment workers particularly hard because they are not guaranteed a specific amount of work each year. If a Broadway show shuts down early or if a film is made overseas, the workers are unemployed until another production comes along.

	Stronger together: The union enables actors to receive health care they otherwise wouldn't get, says SAG President Melissa Gilbert.

Increasingly, media consolidation under a handful of companies has exacerbated the health care crisis, says John Clark, president of NABET/CWA. With many stations undergoing changes in ownership, Clark says, health care plans often are changed to increase employees’ costs or drop benefits. Today, all of the unions in entertainment and news are fighting hard at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to stop further deregulation that could lead to more media consolidation and mega mergers.

People can’t afford to pay for health care,” he says. “This needs to be handled on a national level. Universal health care ought to be on the front burner of government.”

As recently as last year, many movie and television SAG members were not provided health care contributions from employees in films produced overseas. But in May 2002 SAG launched a campaign for enforcement of Global Rule One, which states that SAG members must work under the terms of its basic minimum agreement worldwide. Hundreds of SAG members have endorsed the campaign and to date, there have been no violations.

Before the rule was enforced, says SAG President Melissa Gilbert, workers were not guaranteed residuals (a fee that goes to the performers every time the film is shown commercially) from productions filmed overseas and employers were not contributing to SAG’s pension and health care funds. SAG members’ benefits always have been based on how often an individual employee works and how much he or she earned in a given year, which means that in some years, workers do not qualify for health care—clearly devastating for workers and their families.

“I have another friend who had a great run on ‘The Practice,’ ” Onorati says. “But that job ended and now he’s doing [nonunion] construction work. None of that work comes with benefits, and it doesn’t pay anything into his pension and health care plan. Thank God I have a union, and I don’t have to worry about how I’m going to take care of my two boys if they get sick.”

Why? Because we like you: Child-actor activist Paul Petersen knows first-hand what it's like to work as a child, having started his career as a Mousketeer. Entertainment Industry: Not Child Friendly When the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created some child labor laws, was enacted in 1938, few legislators thought to protect children in entertainment from abuse and overwork. “Their image of child entertainers was Shirley Temple in curls, and the studios said they protected and trained the children. That was a complete lie,” says Paul Petersen, a former child star and co-chair of the Young Performers Committee, a joint committee of the Screen Actors and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Another former child star, SAG President Melissa Gilbert, heads the committee. The rights of child entertainers—actors, athletes, performers in traveling shows, choirs and seasonal productions—routinely are denied, says Petersen, 57, who at age 12 was a regular on “The Donna Reed Show.” Twenty-two states have no child labor laws for entertainers, and some so-called right to work states use the lack of child labor laws to attract TV and movie productions, he says. In a famous case, SAG documented during the production of the 1989 movie “Uncle Buck” that actor Macaulay Culkin, eight years old at the time, worked 19-hour days. “That’s shameful,” Petersen says. Until recently, many child actors did not have any guarantees that the money they made performing would be there when they needed it. Although California state laws required studios to set aside a certain amount of a child actor’s gross income until the child reached 18, there was a catch. The studios only had to set aside the money if the child was hired under a contract that was approved by a court. Studios got around the law by hiring the youngsters as independent contractors and the parents had no obligation to establish savings accounts. In 1995, the California legislature passed a new law that gives control of the money a child actor makes to the child. But that law only applies in California, Petersen says. To change the working conditions for child entertainers and focus attention on their needs, SAG and AFTRA have launched a campaign to draft federal laws extending workplace protections to them. Activists plan to hold rallies in Washington, D.C., this spring to support a bipartisan bill to extend the laws. The motion picture trade association also is on board, Petersen says. “What people have to remember,” Petersen says, “is that child entertainers are treated just like other child workers.”

Tackling technology challenges

The rapid expansion of technology in the entertainment industry is threatening workers’ job security, union leaders say. Today, computer systems can eliminate all the jobs needed to run a television studio except the director’s, Clark says. As a result, many technicians are losing their jobs.

Moves by television conglomerates toward a hubbing system—similar to that used in the airline industry—in which the master controls for multiple radio stations are centralized also are contributing to job loss for technicians and on air talent alike. NBC TV, for example, operates 25 stations from three hubs. While the workers at the hubs are unionized, Clark says, control room operators at the other stations have been let go.

		From America@work, March 2003.

“The industry is being run by the bean counters,” Clark says. “They don’t have a lot of respect for high quality. They just want what they can get away with.”

Live theater is not immune from the loss of jobs to technology, DePaulo says. Although workers are needed to construct sets for live shows, once the sets are in place, one person using a computer can move all the scenery.

To educate the public and coordinate collective bargaining on addressing technological change and other issues, several IATSE locals in New York have joined with Actors’ Equity Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada to form the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds (COBUG).

The coalition’s goal is “to make our collective voice and concerns heard by employers, public officials and the theater-going public,” says Alan Eisenberg, executive director of Equity, who serves with DePaulo as COBUG’s co-chairs.

‘We’re workers like everyone else’

Film and television entertainers also have to deal with subcontracting and employers who move overseas. Over the past several years, increasing numbers of made-for-television productions and feature films by U.S. companies have been produced outside the country.

A study by the Monitor Co. for SAG and the unaffiliated Directors Guild of America shows that between 1990 and 1998, the rate of U.S.-developed films produced outside the country doubled from 14 percent to 27 percent. In 1998, the total economic impact of such runaway productions, including production costs, lost salaries, taxes and other expenses totaled $10.3 billion, compared with roughly $2 billion in 1990.

Productions filmed overseas cost workers the equivalent of 60,000 full-time jobs from 1995–1998, the study estimates. SAG, with Equity, AFTRA, AFM and Teamsters is pursuing federal and state legislation to entice producers back home.

The issues entertainers face mirror the problems all workers have to deal with, Gilbert says. “What happens to us has a ripple effect on all workers. We’re workers like everyone else. If we get sick, we go to the local hospital, we fill prescriptions at the local pharmacy. We get our clothes cleaned at the local dry cleaners. We are in company with a broad band of unions in America, all of us struggling with the problems of health care, globalization and technology.”

Seeking justice: Telemundo broadcasters in Chicago rallied Oct. 26 for the freedom to form a union. Telemundo Workers Looking for Fairness When NBC purchased Miami-based Telemundo last year, employees of the second-largest Spanish-speaking television network in the country saw it as an opportunity to improve their working conditions. But instead of treating Telemundo’s on-air employees with respect, NBC—half of whose stations are unionized—established a two-tiered system that pays the Spanish-speaking workers lower wages and provides fewer benefits, says Herta Suarez, director of special projects for the Television and Radio Artists. The struggle of the Telemundo employees is similar to the fight by Tejano performers and musicians to join the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada. Although Latin music sales skyrocketed in the United States from $260 million in 1995 to $608 million in 2000, the musicians who play the music were receiving a fixed fee per song, no matter how long it took to record. That changed when they gained a union contract in 2001. Telemundo workers, primarily news anchors and reporters in Chicago and Los Angeles—cities where AFTRA already represents NBC employees—are actively seeking a voice at work. AFTRA has asked NBC/Telemundo management to agree to a streamlined process to allow its Spanish-language anchors, reporters and programming staff the opportunity of deciding on union representation while the employer remains neutral in an organizing effort. But NBC/Telemundo executives refuse to recognize AFTRA as the representative of the Telemundo workers. In Chicago, all the workers signed a petition last year asking management to recognize the union, but management has not responded. In their struggle for a voice at work, the employees have reached out to the Latino community and lawmakers. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus wrote a letter to NBC urging the company to recognize the union. The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution in August 2002 calling on NBC to bargain in good faith with AFTRA on behalf of Telemundo talent. “This is a basic matter of fairness and justice,” says Los Angeles City Council member Nick Pacheco, who sponsored the resolution. “The folks who do the reporting for Telemundo deserve the same respect and treatment as their English-language colleagues at NBC.”