Yahoo News IATSE and Studios Reach Tentative Agreement on Area Standards Contract
Entertainment’s top crew union struck a tentative deal with Hollywood’s studios and streamers for a contract covering 23 Locals on Thursday, just two days after their West Coast peers did the same.
IATSE announced in a message to its members that a three-year successor deal to its Area Standards Agreement has been reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The agreement will need to be ratified by IATSE members — 20,000 of whom work under the deal — before it can take effect.
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Significant improvements in the ASA tentative agreement include a scale wage rate increase of 7 percent, 4 percent, and 3.5 percent over the three-year term. The ASA also includes “additional regional wage adjustments and a uniform benefit contribution rate for all jurisdictions with significant increases in both health and retirement representing as much as a $63 increase per employee, per day in some areas.”
Other improvements include triple time paid once 15 hours have elapsed and a 33 percent increase in the Nearby Hire living allowance. There will be also Comprehensive Artificial Intelligence provisions that “defines our covered work and protects against prompts used to displace a covered employee.”
Juneteenth will be added as a holiday, as well as bereavement leave and a New Media Sideletter will be “moved into the body of the agreement with the elimination of delayed 2nd season rates for all high budget streaming series.”
IATSE began negotiating the Area Standards Agreement on May 20, just a few weeks after the union’s West Coast Locals began negotiating their new deal. Leaders came into the talks with the goals of significantly raising wages, standardizing a benefit rate across Locals, regulating the use of AI, disincentivizing long workdays with harsher financial penalties, adding holidays, expanding sick leave and making adjustments to contract sideletters. The Area Standards Agreements talks paused without a deal on June 1, but resumed later that month, long before the agreement’s July 31 expiration date.
Crew members covered by the Area Standards deal work in regions outside of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco.
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