Strikes Possibilities Decrease

The Hollywood Reporter has posted that AFTRA has approved the contract with the studios by 62%. Not exactly overwhelming but enough to get ratify the contract and keep members of that union (many of which are also SAG members) able to remain on the job. AFTRA is a "sister" union of SAG that broke away over disagreements on how the negotiations with the studios where being handled.

"Clearly, many Screen Actors Guild members responded to our education and outreach campaign and voted against the inadequate AFTRA agreement," SAG president Alan Rosenberg said. "We knew AFTRA would appeal to its many AFTRA-only members, who are news people, sportscasters and DJs, to pass the tentative agreement covering acting jobs. In its materials, AFTRA focused that appeal on the importance of actor members' increased contributions to help fund its broadcast members' pension and health benefits."

It’s pretty clear that SAG isn't done and they will continue to hold a hard line to get what they want but it does reduce their bargaining position as they remain the only holdouts. I doubt they are winning any friends either since they are asking for concessions beyond what the writers and directors agreed to pretty much confirming my opinion that actors consider themselves the most important part of Hollywood and thus should get more. In this day and age of tech and the quick rise and fall of stardom, I disagree with that notion.

End result is a strike is in the best interest of nobody and I doubt at this point that even if SAG sent out a call to strike to its members it would get the approval numbers (I think 75% of the membership) needed. What happens next is unknown as SAG has not formally rejected the last proposal from the studios but given every indication that they intend to.

In regards to Transformers, this just means the status quo remains. Since no strike, the schedule (whatever it is) remains the same. If a strike does occur, Bay can now simply work with AFTRA members and film around scenes that require the SAG leads until they become available. The issue isn't the filming schedule itself, the issue is giving ILM and Digital Domain the time they need in post-production to complete the special effects. If worse case scenario occurs (a long term strike), I imagine Bay could simply use stand-ins to at least give the FX teams the footage to work off.

The way I see it, short of a 6 month or more SAG strike, the AFTRA deal pretty much insures that Bay should be able make his release date for Transformers 2.