Carrying signs with slogans such as “When you play me, pay me,” those people whose faces you glimpse on television commercials and whose voices you hear on radio ads went on strike Monday demanding a bigger share of advertising profits in this booming economy.
About 75,000 actors represented by the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists walked off their jobs, rejecting advertisers’ attempts to pay a flat fee instead of residual compensation every time commercials run. The actors dramatized their dispute in rallies Monday in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Union members are hoping their action will virtually shut down commercial production nationwide, but advertisers say that for the immediate future they plan to continue running the same spots and to hire non-union actors.
While big-name actors such as Jerry Seinfeld, Lauren Bacall and James Earl Jones can command six or seven figures for their advertising work, union officials assert that the vast majority of commercial actors earn much more modest wages.
“The average income of a [Screen Actors Guild] member is $7,000 a year or less,” said Elliott Gould, best-known for the original “M*A*S*H” movie and his recent work on the NBC sit-com “Friends.” He attended a rally of 2,500 actors at a Los Angeles museum.
“Generally, audiences look at this business as glamorous,” he added. “It is not.”
Gould said the unions are pressing professional golfer Tiger Woods to show solidarity with fellow SAG members by not shooting a Nike commercial this week. The dispute centers on advertisers’ attempts to halt the nearly 50-year-old practice of paying actors residuals whenever their commercials appear on network television. Instead, advertisers want to pay the same type of flat fee that actors currently get for cable television commercials.
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Currently, principal on-screen actors for network ads earn a base pay of $479. They also get a residual payment ranging from $47 to $123, which gradually drops over time, whenever the commercial is aired. With the residual payments, actors on average earn $13,000 for a 13-week run.
Actors on cable commercials get a flat fee of $479 to $1,014 for a 13-week run of the ad. The unions are demanding a 14 percent raise on both types of commercials.
But advertisers want to switch the network pay structure to a flat fee that would guarantee actors $2,575 for unlimited airings of the ad during a 13-week period, according to the unions.
“The industry’s position is that we’re taking a contract geared to the 1950s and modernizing it to fit modern-day television,” said Ira Shepard, labor counsel for the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which represent 250 agencies and 150 large advertisers.
Shepard said the residual payments made sense when the networks attracted 95 percent of the audience but not anymore with hundreds of cable channels drawing more than 50 percent of viewers.
“We understand that change is difficult,” he added. “We’re trying to modernize the contract, but do it in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody.”
Actors say the new proposal could cut their income dramatically.
“The idea that they want to use our abilities for nothing, for as long as they want, is crazy,” said Paul Cook of Geneva, Ill., who has starred in commercials for Poly Grip, Campbell’s Soup, Bufferin and Oldsmobile.
Cook was among about 600 actors who protested in downtown Chicago on Monday, rallying at the Leo Burnett Co. and Foote, Cone & Belding Chicago advertising agencies, and at the Wrigley Building, IBM and Quaker Oats offices.
Julie Codlin of Chicago, who has been an actress for 30 years, has most recently appeared in Poly Grip ads. But before that job, she did not have a steady commercial stint for two years.
“Our business is like that,” she said. “Now they’re asking us to cut back, not to even keep up.”
Eileen Willenborg, executive director of the Chicago affiliates of SAG and AFTRA said Chicago is a major commercial production center that generates about $35 million a year in work for the advertising industry.
Yet Chicago actors, she said, earn a median annual salary of $4,100.
“We’re not talking about million-dollar hitters. Most have other jobs to make it,” Willenborg said. “We can’t let advertisers roll back the [network pay] structure. It’s hard enough raising families now on what they make.”
SAG President William Daniels, star of the 1980s NBC drama “St. Elsewhere,” said in a statement that actors have been responsible for pushing up advertising revenue and therefore should receive a bigger share of the pie.
“In an age of unprecedented prosperity for both the advertising and entertainment industries, management is crying poverty and wants to roll back the gains working actors have made over the past four decades,” Daniels said, adding that an actor’s salary represents only 2 percent of a commercial’s budget. “It is SAG and AFTRA members … who expertly sell the products that create revenue and income for advertisers and agencies. To not allow performers their fair share of the wealth they create is wrong.”
Similar arguments, seeking to close the wage gap in an era of unprecedented wealth, were made by striking janitors in Los Angeles and Chicago last month. Those disputes have since been settled, with Chicago janitors ending their walkout on April 17 and suburban Chicago janitors ending theirs Friday.
Still left to resolve is the case of Los Angeles teachers, who say they may go on strike if they are unable to reach an agreement with the city’s Board of Education by June 30.
Under the current contract, actors who shoot a commercial that airs continuously on network television can earn tens of thousands of dollars. But that can work against them because advertisers are reluctant to hire an actor closely identified with another product.
Union members say the advertisers’ current contract offer would only exacerbate that situation. Without residual payments, advertisers would be tempted to run the ads more often, harming the actors’ chances of getting new work.
“An actor may make $8,000 for one day’s work,” said Greg Krizman, a guild spokesman.
“But that actor may have had to go on 45 auditions before getting that job. And maybe that’s the only work he’s going to do all year,” he added.
“Out of that $8,000, he has to pay for his pictures, his videocassette, his resume, he has to pay his agent 10 percent–and the rest he has to live on.”
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