In fact, we’re owed payment for them.

Our TV/Theatrical contract states that a performer is owed half the scale day rate for every audition we perform but don’t book. That’s $541 per audition for every studio feature, TV show, or high-budget indie film produced by a SAG-AFTRA signatory. 

Audition Pay has been in our contract since 1947. The union and studios have renewed it every three years. Studios have paid it when performers have filed claims. Other important provisions that were added during the studio era are enforced to this day, including paid overtime and lunch breaks. Auditions are fundamental to our profession, and Audition Pay should be the norm, just like these other protections.

Audition Pay is fair compensation for our work.

Auditions require labor from performers and create value for employers. Our auditions make it possible for studios to cast, develop, and produce the movies and TV shows that make their businesses profitable. Auditions allow producers to assemble casts from a place of knowledge, not speculation. If auditions were not essential, they would already be obsolete.

Auditions are much more than job interviews. An audition is a performance. Auditions require reading scripts, learning unique material, making artistic choices, and rehearsing scenes–all before the audition itself. Auditions bring scripts to life and make characters real. Auditions allow producers to workshop scripts using professional performers’ training and expertise. Self-taped auditions also require technical labor. When a performer self-tapes an audition, we are working two jobs. 

Auditions are crucial to pre-production, and it’s time we get paid what we’re owed for them. 

By limiting Audition Pay, SAG-AFTRA has devalued our work. 

Enforcing the contract is the union’s responsibility. Selectively enforcing it endangers us all. Our past leaders have undermined the union’s power, neglected billions in earnings, and allowed members to suffer decades of lost wages. Such neglect has enabled studios and third-party casting platforms to treat auditioning performers like paying customers rather than workers who create tremendous value. 

We’ve allowed ourselves to believe we should just be grateful for the chance to follow our dreams. But our passion doesn’t diminish our work’s value, nor does it mean employers don’t profit from it. Now is the time to be paid for our most in-demand service.

Through Audition Pay, performers’ earnings will finally reflect our work’s value.  

Enforcing Audition Pay will create the financial stability performers need and have earned. It will increase our access to healthcare, pensions, and unemployment benefits. It will make each audition a more legitimate opportunity, with producers literally invested in each submission. It will make our union stronger, with greater benefits and negotiating power. 

We can’t afford anything less. Every technological advancement has offloaded more of the casting process onto performers. Self-tapes burden performers with costly production labor. Requiring us to provide readers alone has saved producers an estimated $250 million. Producers also now require casting directors to solicit hundreds more tapes per role than they can even watch—including when an offer is already out to a performer. These virtual cattle calls don’t “increase opportunity”; they solicit more work from more performers for lesser chances at each job. SAG-AFTRA must protect paid work, not fake opportunities. 

Meanwhile, we pay dues for benefits we may never see. The vast majority of our members do not make the yearly $26,470 required to qualify for union health insurance. In recent years, thousands of us have been kicked off the union’s health plan—mostly seniors with decades of work behind them. Scores of our members work second and third jobs. We audition more frequently than most workers interview, for jobs that can be as brief as one day. Coming out of a pandemic and facing a probable recession, we weather the same grim economic conditions that studios use to justify underpaying us. This is after years of bragging about their profits and rewarding executives with eight-figure-salaries.

This bleak financial reality does not reflect the frequency, scale, or value of the work we do in auditions. Audition Pay will make our profession sustainable, enabling us to flourish in our careers and lives. 

We didn’t need to win Audition Pay; SAG-AFTRA gave it away, anyway.

Since Audition Pay was already in our contract, we didn’t need to negotiate for it. We needed SAG-AFTRA to protect it through the 2023 contract negotiations. Instead, the union agreed to a contract that largely gives Audition Pay away - defining Self Tapes as unpaid non-work, and making Audition Pay dependent on whether production “explicitly requires” performers to memorize their sides, and forbidding production from requiring memorization for Virtual Auditions. Now there is much work to be done to reverse these actions to make the language that regulate the casting process reflect the industry standards performers navigate everyday. Eventually, SAG-AFTRA needs to establish automated payment procedures to relieve performers of the burden of filing claims for their owed wages. 

SAG-AFTRA needs to hear from its members.

As unionized workers, we have a responsibility to demand action from our leaders on the issues that matter to us. SAG-AFTRA is a democratic organization, 170,000 members strong. Past generations won us fair pay and protections by standing in solidarity. Only together can we do the same, and ensure the future we deserve. 

Our skills as performers make us powerful advocates. We are storytellers. Collaborators. We know how to communicate the depths of the human psyche, hold up mirrors to society, and show intense vulnerability under pressure. We regularly face rejection, crowds, cameras, and critics. We’re agile, we’re resilient, and we bring people together. Our gifts are older than Hollywood and essential to humanity. The entertainment industry does not exist without entertainers. It’s time we get paid what we’re owed.

If you want SAG-AFTRA to enforce Audition Pay, organize with us to support the value of our collective labor.