Talking to SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland and president Sean Astin in 2026, it’s easy to forget that their union waged a painful, prolonged strike just three years earlier.
After emerging from a months-long negotiation with studios and streamers, the pair are complimentary of the studios’ approach under new president Greg Hessinger. Astin asserts that negotiations don’t always have to include brinksmanship. They describe how they leveraged the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ desire for a longer deal term to get AI protections for members and a long-awaited merger for separate pension plans. No taunts aimed at company CEOs or themed picket lines necessary, like during their 2023 strike.
“Obviously the companies really wanted a longer term,” says Crabtree-Ireland, who is also the union’s national executive director. “What can we maybe achieve that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to if we entertain that idea? And that’s how we ultimately ended up there.”
There’s a change in tone this year, for sure, but the parties weren’t exactly holding hands and singing kumbaya for three months while they bargained. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Crabtree-Ireland and Astin describe the achievements and disappointments of their latest negotiation. As Astin put it, “I wouldn’t be doing my job as president of the union if I couldn’t give you a laundry list of a thousand things I thought we should be getting next time.”
What are the most important, headline gains in this deal in your view?
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland: This deal that has a lot of important stuff in it. If I were selecting a few things to highlight, I would say one certainly would be the agreement to merge our pension and retirement plans and the specific process for making that happen. That’s obviously something we’ve been looking to accomplish since merger, since 2012. And so to finally have that pathway laid out and to have an effective date and details, including additional contributions to make it possible, is very gratifying. Another I would say is the artificial intelligence protections. Obviously it’s a topic that’s been constantly under discussion since 2022 and for good reason. There are really meaningful improvements in the digital replication part of the contract, but even more so we have, from my perspective, really significant advances in dealing with synthetics going from our existing contract language … to now [a] specific statement of principles embodying and embracing human performance and an agreement to limit any use of synthetics only to cases where there’s a “significant additional value” provided to a production. And that has to be a “significant additional value” not only over a person, but also over a digital replica of a person. And so that is a meaningful limitation on the use of synthetic technology in the industry and by these major companies that no one’s ever seen before. So I think that’s really a crucial advance.
Obviously the WGA agreed to a four-year deal before you did, which set a precedent, but why did you feel that a four-year deal was worth your while, especially given the pace at which AI is evolving?
Crabtree-Ireland: Really for us it required the right agreement. It required the right elements of the agreement and that included making sure that the AI provisions gave the kind of protection that left us confident our members would be well cared for during a four-year term, but also other provisions that were really important to us, whether that’s residuals, whether that’s obviously the merger of our pension and retirement plans, the companies are putting significant money into both of those areas as well as a whole host of other things in the contract. If you’ve seen the summary, you know that there’s like 56 different major areas that are covered in this contract, that’s quite a lot. And I guess I just want to say for me, and I believe Sean will agree with this and I think our committee, we didn’t come at this as ‘the Writers Guild agreed to four years, so we’re going to agree to four years.’ We came at this from the perspective of ‘What is it that we really want to achieve in this negotiation’? And obviously the companies really wanted a longer term. What can we maybe achieve that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to if we entertain that idea? And that’s how we ultimately ended up there.
Do you envision the four-year deal as a one-time thing or potentially something you may continue to agree to in subsequent negotiating cycles?
Astin: Let me say it like this. There is no pattern, period. Our contract is so wildly different from the other unions, [a] contract that we’re negotiating from our position of strength and our position of need to satisfy the circumstance of our members. We went first this time because we assessed that it was in the interests of the industry to have stability. We have a long list of constituents and a proposal packet that’s very, very, very large and we wanted them to have plenty of time to go through it. And so we never felt stressed or pressured. Will we do that again next time? We’ll see.
I think there is a grown up way of looking at bargaining. Bargaining shouldn’t always be about brinksmanship. It should be the normal course of doing business. It shouldn’t have such upset associated with it. That said, being reasonable, being thoughtful does not mean being weak. And I feel pretty confident they understood that our members reserve the right to take whatever actions necessary to achieve our goals. So I’m proud of the way we approached it and what we accomplished.
Let’s talk a little bit about the merger of the SAG and AFTRA pension plans. This brings up some very old history for SAG-AFTRA and not everyone is happy about it. What is your argument for why a merged pension plan will benefit union members?
Crabtree-Ireland: The number one argument is that there are almost a thousand members just in the last year who could have qualified for a pension credit if we had had a merged plan and they didn’t. This is actual people who didn’t because their earnings were split between the SAG Pension Plan and the AFTRA Retirement Fund. As a union, it’s our job to help make sure benefits are available to the greatest portion of our members that we can. So the idea [was] having the opportunity to bring these plans together and solve that problem once and for all. This is really important for a large swath of members who’ve been affected by that in the past and the present.
Astin: I would say that this is the fulfillment of a long-term promise and what’s complicated is how people who have been aware of the dynamics over the last 13 years are able to make peace with what they’ve been upset about. But once they look at the details of this process as it’s been laid out and the protections that are in place legally, contractually, financially, and in every other way to make sure that participants are safe, they’re protected and that going forward we will be operating efficiently when you’re only administering one retirement program as opposed to two. And in terms of the fundamental premise of how it works, the companies wanted this. It’s a big piece of money for them to put on the table to accomplish this right now. So this is another one of the many things that you could connect to the producers’ desire [for] a longer term and the stability that they were pursuing to achieve this heightened level of efficiency and security for the plans.
On which issues did you not make as much progress as you wanted to in this round of talks?
Astin: The joking answer would be all of them, you always want more, but I understand the spirit of your question. I think residuals are something that we made a really important leap forward on this time, but having our members continue to share in the financial life of the work that they invest their time, energy and talent in [is] something we have not fully achieved yet. So I look forward to working on that. [But] I wouldn’t be doing my job as president of the union if I couldn’t give you a laundry list of a thousand things I thought we should be getting next time.
Crabtree-Ireland: I’m always reluctant to prejudge what our W&W process and our negotiating committee will decide [are] our priorities. And so even as recently as last year, when I’m talking about AI, I’m always very careful to say that those priorities are determined at the time and we’re going to want to see what our experience is under this contract before we decide what we’re going to push for in our next round of bargaining. Having said that, I agree with what Sean said. I think AI will continue to evolve and there will need to be continued evolution of AI terms and provisions, although I feel very confident that these provisions will be more than sufficient to get our members through the term of this contract and in fact build a structure for the future.
What was it like negotiating with a former SAG leader — and former AFTRA leader — in Greg Hessinger?
Crabtree-Ireland: I worked with Greg in both of those capacities and since, when he’s been on the opposite side of the table from us. I think that Greg showed a great deal of sensitivity to the concerns that our members raised and he’s certainly no pushover. He’s a very tough negotiator and very skilled at what he does. But I think he also brought a new vibe to the bargaining table that has actually served the AMPTP very well if you see the kinds of results in the Writers Guild negotiations and in our negotiation—not served them well in the sense of they got away with anything, but served them well in the sense of building the kind of relationship like Sean described where bargaining doesn’t have to be a crisis every time. That bargaining can be about building a long-term relationship and finding ways to meet each other’s needs without harming our own constituencies. I think there’s reason to be optimistic about that.
Astin: Here’s a quote-length response: He helped reset the relationship between our organizations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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