Complaint Review: Screen Actors Guild

With 95% (NINETY-FIVE) of actors unemployed at any given time, you have the nerve to support doubling dues for non-working actors??  What, to support the dues reduction of the few who are lucky enough to work?? To pay for you to monitor and stamp out dissent like some soviet era relic?   (I notice you are careful to couch your rebuttal with code term like "working" actors, knowing full well that non-working actors are the vast majority of the membership, a membership that, like me, was duped by SAG's failure to highlight the high cost to the vast majority of union members).  How DARE you be so cavalier with other people's hard earned money!  How DARE you distort the truth that the higher dues are necessary to maintain duplicate officers, staffs and the destructive little bureaucratic minions that eat up our dues.  It is disgusting seeing your arrogant attitude, not only of entitlement to union membership money, but to arbitrarily sucking out more of it to suit your blatant bureaucratic greed!

If you had READ the Ballot materials, it was all there.  You not only would have seen the Proposed Dues Structure, you would have seen that we included an Opposition Statement for you to read, which agreed with you.  But the members of the Screen Actors Guild did NOT agree with you by a YES Vote of 82% - that is an historically high mandate by any standard.  Your Work Dues will go down, and you won't have to join a second union.  Given the shift of TV work increasingly to AFTRA over the last 4-6 years, most members who really want to work would eventually have join it, paying a second Initiation Fee.  So all in all, you will be saving money with this merger.  And FINALLY, all performers and broadcasters can now move forward together and devote their considerable energy to organizing more work for you and for all members.

If you had READ the Ballot materials, it was all there.  You not only would have seen the Proposed Dues Structure, you would have seen that we included an Opposition Statement for you to read, which agreed with you.  But the members of the Screen Actors Guild did NOT agree with you by a YES Vote of 82% - that is an historically high mandate by any standard.  Your Work Dues will go down, and you won't have to join a second union.  Given the shift of TV work increasingly to AFTRA over the last 4-6 years, most members who really want to work would eventually have join it, paying a second Initiation Fee.  So all in all, you will be saving money with this merger.  And FINALLY, all performers and broadcasters can now move forward together and devote their considerable energy to organizing more work for you and for all members.

If SAG had informed membership that dues were increasing by "almost" double (if it pleases you to use exact figures to refute the obvious greedy truth)  this outrageous dues ripoff, and the merger, NEVER WOULD HAVE PASSED!  That's why it was BURIED in the resolutions!  SAG knew, after several futile failed attempts to pass this merger that it had to hide the cost to get it passed.  I voted for it.  And then I got my dues bill with the "hidden" cost finally revealed.  OUTRAGEOUS AND DECEPTIVE!!

The recent merger of SAG & AFTRA to form SAG-AFTRA was VOTED on by the membership of both unions...and it was approved by 82% and 86% of the members respectively.  The Base Dues for former SAG members went from $116 to $198 per year (after no increase in many years).  Working Dues went DOWN for almost all SAG members.  Complete information on the new Dues Structure was provided to all members in their ballot package, online and explained at Informational Meetings all over the country. So you are incorrect in your math and in your entire characterization.