According to Karen Austin, national recording secretary of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), production of commercials in Los Angeles is down by 90 percent. Producers are meeting resistance as they scramble to find locations where they can hire enough experienced actors to cross the line.

"They can't even go to Canada, because our sister union is honoring our strike," stated Austin, "as are the unions in the United Kingdom and the International Federation of Actors. There's no place they can hide."

A key demand in the strike is "pay-per-play"--to maintain the practice of paying actors each time a commercial is shown and institute a onetime fee for unlimited use of a commercial. If the ad bosses roll back this gain, the union estimates an actor would average only $11 per day over the normal 13-week commercial cycle.

In Chicago the median annual income for union actors from commercial work is $4,200. The auditioning, preparing, and being on call is full-time work; very few actors, however, earn more than a part-time income from it. Only 8 percent earn enough to qualify for health and pension benefits each year.

When actors here find out about auditions, shooting schedules, and locations of struck work, a rapid response team of strikers has often been able to convince nonunion actors to refuse the audition, turn down the offered work, or even walk off the set of a struck production. There are reports of actors leaving behind upward of $60,000 in fees.

After considerable debate the union is now offering actors not in the union the opportunity to get their union card by serving 80 hours of strike duty on picket lines and telephones. In Los Angeles the program has been so successful that 1,200 actors have signed up for the SAG eligibility program, and the union has placed others on a waiting list.

Twenty-nine-year old Dale Inghram said that until the strike he was apathetic about the union, but now he's on strike "for as long as it takes." He was especially inspired by telephone workers of the Communication Workers of America who helped the actors bring the strike to a stockholders meeting of telephone giant AT&T.

More than 1,600 production companies have broken ranks with the producers' Joint Policy Committee to sign interim agreements accepting the unions' contractual conditions. This past week Ford Motor Co. announced a moratorium on its production of commercials for its 2001 models until the strike is settled.

Claudia Hommel is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.  
 
 
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