After over a month of negotiating, all 13 of IATSE’s West Coast Locals have reached tentative deals with the AMPTP, IATSE announced today. Now the real fight can begin.
On Thursday, April 25, the last of the remaining 13 locals, Affiliated Property Craftspersons Local 44, reached a tentative agreement with the studios, and Studio Teachers, IATSE Local 884, reached a deal on April 19, opening the door for IATSE’s national negotiating committee to restart negotiations on the Basic Agreement. Those talks are scheduled to kick off on April 29 and continue through May 16.
“Our locals’ craft-specific issues required the employers’ attention, and at the table we’re seeing improved engagement and dialogue,” IATSE’s International vice president Mike Miller said in a statement. “That indicates the studios’ negotiators have different marching orders this contract cycle. This approach will be helpful as we continue our negotiations over the next few weeks.”
Each of the 13 locals (44, 80, 600, 695, 700, 705, 706, 728, 729, 800, 871, 884, and 892) were negotiating issues specific to their own crafts and union members, with two locals talking with the studios at a time. They reached tentative deals largely without any hiccups. A few of the locals, including Local 44 representing set decorators and propmakers, did not reach a deal in their allotted three days of scheduled bargaining and bled into the following week, but there were no delays in the overall schedule, and IATSE even scheduled a week of caucusing to account for such a scenario if things ran long.
The locals haven’t had a chance to negotiate a new contract for the last six years, with Covid interrupting what would’ve been the prior round of negotiations. And it’s also unprecedented that each of the 13 locals got several days of individual time scheduled in advance in order to work through their contracts. Not all of the locals has always had the time afforded to them to come to the negotiating table.
Terms of the tentative deals with each of the locals have not been revealed to members just yet, and they won’t be put up for ratification until after IATSE has reached a tentative deal on the Basic Agreement. IATSE recently flopped the order of its bargaining schedule, intending to negotiate the Basic Agreement followed by the Area Standards Agreement, which covers craftspeople working outside of Los Angeles. Negotiations for the ASA will start on May 20 and run through May 31.
The real battle now begins with the studios over issues wage increases, pension and health contributions, quality of life conditions such as lengths of workdays, meal penalties, and turnaround times, job security, residuals, and the big elephant in the room, AI.
IATSE already got the ball rolling on talks related to health plan terms and pension benefits back on March 4, and they teamed up with the Teamsters and Hollywood Basic Crafts to speed along the process. Teamsters and Basic Crafts won’t begin their individual talks until sometime in June.
