Roberta Reardon, national president of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, and Kim Hedgpeth, national executive director of the group, are about as relaxed as union leaders get nowadays. Which, beneath those cool exteriors, is probably not all that relaxed, given the difficulty of navigating a labor organization through hard times.þþ“The first thing a union does is mirror the industry it covers,” Ms. Reardon said Friday at a press briefing in the union’s Los Angeles office. The federation represents about 70,000 actors, broadcasters and various artists who work largely in radio, television and new media.þþIn preparing for a national convention, which is to start Aug. 6 in Chicago, Ms. Reardon and Ms. Hedgpeth talked with a handful of reporters about the way things are right now. Mostly, they’re tough, especially in the broadcast area, where radio and television stations have been cutting jobs and trimming salaries. Cable television production, they said, has held fairly steady, and some lines of work are promising growth — notably in the area of audio books, where the federation has been trying to organize talent.þþBut Ms. Hedgpeth said she didn’t expect to see the full extent of the media shakeout until at least the middle of 2010. þþIn the meantime, according to Ms. Reardon and Ms. Hedgpeth, the federation is planning to concentrate on an organizing drive. One challenge, they said, is that the proliferation of state-sponsored film incentives has spread television work around the country, making productions much harder to track and unionize than they used to be, when everything was concentrated in Los Angeles and New York. The organizing push will also extend to new media, and definitely to those audio books.þþHaving just (barely) survived a grueling cycle of contractual talks between media companies and the whole gamut of Hollywood unions, the Aftra leaders said they planned to wait a few months before getting too deeply involved with unity initiatives with the Screen Actors Guild and other unions. That’s because a series of elections is soon expected to change the leadership at a number of unions, including that at the Writers Guild of America West. þþMs. Reardon is also up for re-election. But so far, she said, she is unopposed.þþA merger with the Screen Actors Guild remains a long-term goal of the federation, which has advocated a combination that might add considerably to the two unions’ bargaining power. But that is not likely to happen before the next round of contract talks, said Ms. Reardon. For the moment, it’s all about clearing heads in the wake of the last round — and keeping a wary eye on the financial markets, which, in Ms. Hedgpeth’s words, brought “absolute devastation” to the health and pension funds of virtually all unions in the fourth quarter of last year.þ
Source: NY Times
