With their bitter feud over TV having raged for more than 18 months, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists are finding it difficult to return to Phase One, their joint bargaining agreement, in order to better negotiate a new commercials contract.
In late March, AFTRA suspended Phase One, just before negotiations on the TV contract were to begin. After the federation reached a tentative deal with producers, SAG waged an intense campaign to defeat it, but it passed anyway. (About 44,000 actors belong to both unions.) On July 9, the day after AFTRA's TV pact was ratified, SAG national executive director Doug Allen sent a letter to AFTRA asking it to return to Phase One to jointly renegotiate their commercials contracts, which expire in late October.
On Aug. 18, Roberta Reardon and Kim Roberts Hedgpeth, AFTRA's national president and national executive director, sent a letter to Allen and SAG national president Alan Rosenberg that suggested AFTRA might return to Phase One, with conditions. Among them is that the unions, which have always had a problematic relationship, attempt to resolve their longstanding issues by holding talks monitored by the AFL-CIO. AFTRA and SAG held similar talks in January, supervised by Peter diCicco, who was appointed by AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.
Reardon told Sweeney in a letter, also sent Aug. 18, that "AFTRA abhors and detests SAG's hostile behavior" but would return to Phase One if the conditions were right. Allen and Rosenberg told Reardon and Hedgpeth in a subsequent letter that it is still "unclear as to whether AFTRA has actually accepted [SAG's] unconditional offer to participate in Phase One negotiations." They added that they are open to AFL-CIO talks but want an answer on negotiating terms soon.
—Andrew Salomon