Hacker News Reader

Comment by Herrin | Hacker News Reader

The Screen Actors Guild, and the players unions for most professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc). They recognize that their members have different levels of talent, and allow the stars to make more, while still ensuring basic rights for every member.

View on HN

SAG and all the professional sports unions do set minimum pay scale. In the case of the NBA, the maximum pay is set well below open-market levels.

Presumably a maximum pay is set with the intention of allowing that money to go elsewhere in the sport? The NBA knows stars will get paid very well, but they want to ensure not all the money is spent on them so that lesser known players are fairly compensated as well. It seems a smart idea especially because an instituted max is still allowing stars to be paid 8 figures a year.

IMO, the maximum pay/salary caps are set to promote competition across the league. As an entertainment product provided by a monopoly supplier, that's exactly the right thing to do. As a (clearly hypothetical if you'd ever met me) top talented employee under such a scheme, it's terribly counter-productive to my individual situation.

> the players unions for most professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc)

This is wrong. The major sports unions all collectively bargain minimum salaries, and in some cases maximum salaries as well.

You can't get a job in a SAG affiliated production until enough SAG members are hired, but you can't become a SAG member until you've been in a SAG affiliated production.

I'm not an actor, but on the outside that Catch 22 stinks of Old Boy Network tactics.

And how's that working out for them? The median SAG/AFTRA member makes less than $1,000 per year from acting. And the pro sports players associations are tiny -- they exclude the much larger group of athletes who try to make a living playing sports but don't make the big leagues.

Lesser leagues also have unions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22359888

And those that don't, want them:

https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2018/6/5/17251534/mlb-draft-min...

https://www.theringer.com/2019/1/23/18193121/ufc-unionizatio...

SAG/AFTRA is a large union that represents actors in TV/film, as well as actors in theater, who generally make diddly squat because not many people watch theater performances in the US.

By way of comparison, the rate for a single background-role (i.e., as an extra) in a commercial at SAG rates is more than 3x the non-SAG rate for the same time. ($630 vs $200). If you live in a city like LA or NY, you could make a living wage working (as a background actor) just 45 days a year.

SAG's hourly rates are great on paper - well above market, in fact. The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them, which is why their actual income is so low. The way SAG maintains its power despite this is by requiring productions that want to hire more in-demand actors to only employ SAG actors, forcing everyone to sign up to SAG and commit to waiting tables rather than acting most of the time.

If you cast your mind back to the video game voice actor strike a few years ago, for example, you may recall that one of the justifications for that was that they needed more money because many of them were only getting something like one day's work a month on average. Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors. Back in the day, a lot of video game and anime voice acting was apparently done by union members under pseudonyms so the union didn't find out; that's probably harder to get away with these days.

The net result of this is that your typical SAG member who doesn't have the power to demand higher rates anyway based on their own reputation ends up with almost no work because so few productions can afford to hire them,

This is false. Pretty much every theatrical film, broadcast or cable TV show, and nationally aired commercial in the US is subject to union/guild scales (and even Netflix has begun negotiating with the unions and guilds.)

If you have a "reputation" in Hollywood then you are making above scale because your agent has the leverage to demand above scale. And if you don't, that generally means you are a background player and you're making minimum scale. And at that level, you have trouble finding work because there are hundreds of thousands of other actors competing for the same roles, not because the productions can't afford you.

Yes, because there isn't that much voice over work in video games, and AAA studios were paying minimum scale for games that ultimately grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mostly because no-one outside of the big triple-AAA games could afford to hire union voice actors.

This is false. The union scale for video game voiceover work was $825/session, no residuals no benefits. It usually takes less than 3 sessions to record all of an actor's lines, so you're looking at a total net outlay of less than $2500 for an actor's voiceover work in a video game. If your studio can't afford that for a game in which voiceover work is important enough to justify 3 sessions of recording, then you're not a studio, you're a hobby. (But on that note, a different, lower scale applies to low-budget games, just like it does to low-budget film and TV productions.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com