What is the AMPTP?
The AMPTP is the collective bargaining representative for our employers.
The AMPTP, or Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, negotiates 58 industry-wide contracts on behalf of more than 350 producers, streamers, studios and networks, including Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros-Discovery, Apple, Universal, Sony, Paramount, ABC, NBC, FOX and CBS.
The Audition Pay provision is in SAG-AFTRA’s TV/Theatrical Codified Basic Agreement with the AMPTP, to be renegotiated this June. The AMPTP also negotiates contracts with our sister unions. When the AMPTP doesn’t agree to meet unions’ demands for fair wages and benefits, workers are forced to strike.
When entertainment unions strike, #BlameTheAMPTP.
Audition Pay is not an issue between performers and casting directors, but SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP.
Casting directors are employed by producers, just like us, and many are members of our sister union, the Teamsters. The casting process is producers’ responsibility, and it is producers who are exploiting performers by not paying us our contracted rates.
The companies represented by the AMPTP generate billions of dollars in revenue every year.
You may have heard claims that streamers are “not profitable,” but this only means that they do not generate short-term profits quickly enough to meet the stock market’s demand for growth. When they lay off thousands of employees, it’s for profits that only their shareholders will see. Even through so-called tough times, their executives’ salaries stay in the seven-to-nine figure range.
In past negotiations, the AMPTP have feigned ignorance over new technology in order to pay independent contractors less or not at all, before profiting mightily off such technological disruptions:
“...The folks running [the WGA] made a very good argument that this is what [the producers] always do when a new technology comes out: they say that they don't understand it, they can't pay us because it's not clear what it will mean, then they make ungodly sums of money and by the time we get a tiny little piece of it, they have moved on to the next technology and then they make the same argument.”
Today, the AMPTP’s illogical responses to the Writers Strike shows their lack of respect for their workers and the value we create. CEOs have bragged that streaming is currently and will continue to be profitable, at the same time that they plan to move production overseas to exploit unprotected foreign workers until American writers’ “love for working” ends the strike. Meanwhile, head AMPTP negotiator Carol Lombardini called writers “lucky” to have term employment at all.
The entertainment industry can afford Audition Pay.
Studios can and will increase production budgets when contractually obligated. Required COVID-19 safety protocols increased production budgets by 5%. By contrast, Audition Pay will increase production budgets by 1%, based on pre-pandemic audition volume. As the SAG-AFTRA Return to Work Agreement lapses, productions are either minimizing or removing COVID-19 protocols and their costs. Employers are set to save billions of dollars a year in spending. Will they use those savings to fairly compensate their employees?
Only if we demand it.