The Screen Actors Guild is preparing to close most of its 24 offices around the nation, leaving brick-and-mortar headquarters only in Los Angeles, New York, and Miami, along with shared offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The streamlining is supposed to save the guild $1.3 million annually.
In total, the guild will still maintain a presence in 15 cities. It will place district executives in Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, Detroit, Austin, Denver, Phoenix, Seattle, and Honolulu. Branch and regional reps will serve all cities currently covered by branch offices.
Robert Pisano, the guild's national executive director-chief executive officer, who has sole authority for the closings, informed SAG's national board of directors of the shutdowns and restructuring at press time on Tuesday. The board was meeting in plenary session on Monday and Tuesday at SAG's national headquarters in Hollywood.
"The objectives of this new structure are to refocus our resources into organizing and job creation for members, contract enforcement, and member services," Pisano said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon. "The restructuring is part of the ongoing reorganization of the entire administrative infrastructure of the guild, which commenced last October."
A SAG release provided the rationale that "branch offices will be organized around regions, with headquarters in cities containing the largest concentration of guild members, the highest level of production activity, and the highest potential for new work."
Melissa Gilbert, SAG's national president, who campaigned on keeping branches open, met with branch board members Monday night to prepare them for Pisano's Tuesday report.
Branch leaders themselves were prepping to carry questions from their boards to Pisano at the Tuesday morning session. The branches represent 21% of SAG's 98,000 members.
Most of the branches work out of combined SAG-AFTRA offices, many with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists operating each site and billing SAG for a portion of office space that a SAG exec occupies. Performers tend to be members of both unions.
SAG will be pulling out its physical presence at these offices: Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Nashville, Las Vegas, North Carolina, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, and St. Louis. The guild noted that its shared agreement with AFTRA will end no later than April 30, 2003, except for Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington.
"The hard questions are what will the branch reps come up with" in answering questions about the new scheme, CeCe DuBois told Back Stage from Los Angeles Tuesday morning, as she geared up for the morning session with Pisano. DuBois is a SAG board member from Nashville. "We'll be going home and have to answer the questions from our board."
She said that at 7 a.m. Los Angeles time Monday, she had received a call from her board in Nashville, which had gathered at the local headquarters, and wanted to know what Pisano was preparing to do. But DuBois had not received the exec's report yet.
DuBois said that Pisano appears to be "superimposing a corporate model on a labor union. Who can say whether it will work? Time and the dollars gained or lost will reflect its success or failure."
Pisano's action seems in line with recommendations from the Towers Perrin report that consultants had prepared for SAG two years ago. It had called for keeping SAG headquarters in Los Angeles and New York, along with regional offices in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, and San Francisco, while closing the rest.
Branch leaders interviewed recently have indicated that SAG's ending its physical presence in any specific area could send producers scurrying away from SAG and into contracts with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or turning to non-union productions, particularly in the nation's right-to-work states.
Also, SAG's branch leaders are receiving scowls from many members--who during the 2000 commercials contract strike put their careers on the line for the union--and now feel the guild is turning its back on them.