Important Bargaining News!

February 21, 2007 - A tentative agreement has been reached in the ACTRA strike. The strike has been suspended pending ratification of the new IPA agreement.

ACTRA AND PRODUCERS REACH NEW AGREEMENT (Press Release)

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Dear fellow performer,

ACTRA's first national strike is finally over. Last night, U.S. studios informed the CFTPA that they were going to permit it to sign the collective agreement negotiated with us.

How did we do?

With this note, we'd like to outline for you what was negotiated - the gains and the gives.

Let's start with the gains.

Pay: The producers accepted ACTRA's bottom-line pay demand. Members will receive a 10% increase in compensation under this agreement.

• 9% will go into our pay.

• Employer contributions into our ACTRA Fraternal pension accounts will increase from 6% to 7% (that's a 16% increase into what will be going into pensions - the first pension increase in many years).

Internet: As you likely know, we had quite an argument with producers about the internet. They demanded that we agree, in effect, to allow them to distribute our work on the internet for free. We told them that we were willing to defer this issue for a while to a study committee. But if they insisted, they would have to pay for those rights, since the internet is likely to be one of the (if not the) principal distribution channels for our work in the future.

What happened, ultimately, is that the producers split. Canadian producers agreed to pay. American producers decided to wait a while, as we originally proposed, to see what gets negotiated in looming talks with the Directors Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America and SAG. So:

• Canadian producers will begin paying 3.6% of any internet revenues, accounted for in a separate stream, from first dollar. This is the first clean, unqualified residual in our agreement.

• American producers will track internet revenues, pay interest on them and pay sums owed retroactively after we finalize internet terms with them about 24 months from now.

Work rules: ACTRA negotiated some significant improvements in the work rules governing our time on set.

• We negotiated better, tougher equal opportunity and anti-harassment rules.
  
• Rules protecting children are significantly improved.
  
• Safety and insurance provisions have been toughened up.

• And we have negotiated a new ‘basic on-set conditions' checklist that will hopefully end a number of unacceptable practices on set. The checklist speaks to clean water, suitable seats, male and female dressing rooms, safe storage, safe transportation, appropriate rest breaks, injury reports, basic sanitary conditions, clean washrooms, reasonable temperatures, etc. ACTRA has made it clear, having underlined these basic standards on set, that we will use the rights set out in our contract to enforce them.

Our strike weapon: ACTRA has never been on strike before. Our legal standing was aggressively tested by lawyers from the producers' associations in every forum they could find. We're pleased to report that our excellent legal team beat them on every single manoeuvre they tried. As a result of this, we spent many hours in acrimonious discussions to agree on a much clearer, stronger negotiation protocol.

• This protocol makes it much less likely that the producers' association could or would attack a national ACTRA strike as ‘illegal' under provincial law, as they have threatened to do many times in recent years.

• It simultaneously permits us to apply for the legal rights and protections unions have under provincial labour law.

• And it allows us to cleanly terminate the IPA and the protocol if we judged appropriate in a notably serious future dispute.

No collective agreement is a one-way street. Producers raised some legitimate issues with us in these talks. In good-faith bargaining the union has to give as well as take.

We provided some "gives" to producers in three areas.

Independent, 100% Canadian, low-budget production: We updated the terms of our agreement to provide help to productions that are 100% Canadian and are producing on lower budgets. The experience we have had in this round of bargaining underlines the critical importance of a strong, viable, Canadian domestic industry to our futures. Lower-budget Canadian producers credibly spoke to the financial challenges they face in today's environment.

• We updated the budget levels below which Canadian producers can qualify for the IPA's Canadian Independent Production Incentive Program (CIPIP) rules. Feature films with budgets under $1.5 million and television productions under $150,000 per 1/2 hour episode can now access these rules.

• We also trimmed the back-end rates to make it easier for producers to find markets for these 100% Canadian cast and crew low-budget shows. CIPIP residual rates were dropped by 1% across the board. They used to range from 6% to 12% and will now range from 5% to 11% depending on the pre-payment selected.

• In return for this we toughened up qualification rules for CIPIP. We made it clear that non-Canadian producers cannot access these terms through Canadian front companies.

Harmonized national background voucher rules: In the past 10 years, Toronto has steadily declined as a production centre, while Vancouver and Montreal have generally grown from strength to strength. There are many reasons for this. A key reason is an edifice of rules and preferences built into our industry from top to bottom - in CRTC rules, Canadian Television Fund rules, the structure of provincial tax credits, the way infrastructure has developed, and in many other ways, including in our own ACTRA agreement. The time has come to put Canada's three major production centres on a level playing field. We took a small step in that direction in our agreement, at the urgent request of Ontario producers, moving to harmonized national rules for background vouchers.

Under the old agreement, these rules worked as follows:

 
The new national rules look like this (changes in brackets):

In this area as in others, ACTRA needs to stop looking for ‘local wins,' and to work instead for steady national progress for all members through our national agreement. Just as we already do on wages, benefits and work rules. We will work to increase vouchers in future agreements in all three major production centres (UBCP is negotiating to harmonize to at least the levels of Montreal and Toronto).

‘Reality' shows: We're not doing very well organizing the steady stream of reality shows filling up cable network hours. Some 80% of these shows are currently produced non-union. Why? ACTRA did a careful study of this issue over the past three years. Our contract - which is a good fit from dramatic production in all of its forms - doesn't fit so well in this kind of production. But "reality"shows are a fact of life that isn't going away; they represent potential work opportunities for members; and they've matured to the point where many "reality show"producers are interested in employing professional performers under our agreement. To help us organize this sector:

• We've written inclusion rules that will allow us to organize on-air hosts, judges, and recurring characters on these shows, without having to organize one-time or infrequently appearing ‘real people.'
  
• We've written some production rules that reflect the way these shows are actually shot. Productions can simultaneously shoot up to three shows under these new rules.

• We have tailored use rules that fit this ‘show it once - no shelf life' form of production. A 50% payment will buy four years' use.

Those are the highlights of this agreement. In sum:

• We fought off a hyper-aggressive attempt to strip our agreement, including proposals to roll back pay on most productions by 25%, to strip our work rules and to force us to accept grossly concessionary terms on new media.
  
• Instead, we obtained an excellent 10% wage package, acceptable internet rates, better work rules and a stronger strike weapon for the future.
  
• We agreed to steps to promote indie Canadian production, we harmonized BG vouchers nationally and we set up to organize reality shows.

This has been a most difficult negotiation. And it has been the first strike in ACTRA's 64-year history. As members of your bargaining committee, we're extremely grateful for the strong support the overwhelming majority of members extended to your union - our union. As Gordon Pinsent put it so well when he received the first re-launched ACTRA Award of Excellence four years ago, "ACTRA is the house we have built for ourselves." Some 97% of us voted to make that point to producers with the strike vote that gave your bargaining committee the power it needed to prevail in this dispute. We have won an excellent new collective agreement.

A ratification package and ballot will be on its way to you soon. We urge you to vote "yes"to ratifying this agreement.

If you have any questions about this agreement please don't hesitate to contact us. Look for a question and comment section on both the national and Toronto websites: www.actra.ca and www.actratoronto.com.