I pause for a moment from the discussion about the auto industry to check out what is happening in the actors’ house of labor. It ain’t pretty. Some of you may have read that there has been a long on-going internal fight in the Screen Actors Guild since…well, really, this goes back 20 years or more, sad to say but this particular round has blown up over the current negotiations between the union and Big Media over digital rights. The tension boils down to this: should the union take a strike vote and raise the ante in the on-going negotiations?

   There was a pretty brutal meeting in New York last night, and the LA Times gives a blow-by-blow, metaphorically speaking, though it almost came to that:

After a raucous three-hour meeting, SAG members said the union remained more divided than ever. New York members used the forum to lambaste the union’s leadership for its handling of the contract negotiations.

Actor Alec Baldwin said after he left the New York meeting that the current leadership had failed and should step down from the negotiating committee.

"Nothing against them personally," he said. "I respect them. I think they did the best that they could. I’m just very curious why three other major unions came to terms with the [studios] and we haven’t. We’re not negotiating effectively because we are too fragmented ourselves. . . . They have failed as negotiators."

After the meeting, an exhausted-looking SAG President Alan Rosenberg emerged saying he remains just as determined as ever to hold a strike authorization vote and blamed the internal divisions on a historical divide within the union.

"There’s always been a war between New York and Los Angeles, and it’s tragic," he said. "I think they had the room pretty much stacked against us. . . . [The studios] know about the differences between New York and L.A. and they just wait for us to disintegrate. As long as we have this refusal to march together, we are going to be hard-pressed to make a good deal on any contract."

   While the anger is superficially about the current debate over the need to show a strong hand against the industry versus the advisability of striking, or even calling for a strike vote, in a time of economic uncertainty, the truth is that this debate should never have turned this ugly–though it certainly isn’t the first time in labor history that the question of striking or not has roiled the internal life of a union. The problem is that the entertainment unions–Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, the two branches of the Writers Guild of America, IATSE–still operate as if they are living in isolated worlds where they can continue to exercise power and make deals that help their members…on their own.

   The problem is that the world has changed. The consolidation in the industry, and the advent of the Internet and the far cheaper devices now available to make movie-quality product, means that the unions need to act as one. Actually, they need to be one: I have long argued that there needs to be a merger between all those major unions (and if you can drag the Directors Guild of America into the family, great but that may prove to be too difficult in the short-term). Everyone is working for the same employers and the the critical issue–rights in the digital age–really has the same application from union to union. Merger would mean a big savings of money because a lot of overlapping tasks could be consolidated. It’s a no-brainer–except that, to get there, some people are going to have to give up some very lucrative staff positions and/or power for the greater good. Short of a merger, you have on-going, silly, jurisdictional fights between, for example, SAG and AFTRA that make no sense–actually, those fights are hurting the members. And so we get to this point.

   I actually think the people running the unions–the leaderships and executive staff–are pretty smart. They know the business has changed. Which makes it all the more head-shaking that there continues to be internal turmoil, mainly between among the actors. It isn’t inevitable. There needs to be some set of grown-ups that, long after this contract is settled, figure out how to move past the intrigue and bad blood and build an effective creators’ movement.

   The enemy, my friends, is not in your house–it’s over at the multi-nationals.