SAG-AFTRA Yanks Franchise Of Hanlon Talent Agency

By David Robb

By David Robb

By Cynthia Littleton

By David Robb

By David Robb

The SAG-AFTRA Health Plan has cut 50% from the cost of premiums for the second quarter in response to the coronavirus crisis.

By David Robb

Two words have been bouncing around the email inboxes and Slack channels that now comprise the virtual workplaces of Hollywood’s talent agencies, and they aren’t “social” and “distancing.”

By David Robb

SAG-AFTRA has adopted a program to provide dues relief for its members during the COVID-19 global pandemic, the union said Monday. Under the program, members experiencing financial hardship resulting from work stoppages related to COVID-19 will be granted a due date extension and an installment plan for those payments.

By David Robb

By David Robb

SAG-AFTRA has developed a program to provide dues relief for SAG-AFTRA members during the Covid-19 pandemic with an extension of the May 1 deadline.

Hollywood’s creative guilds have been working overtime to keep residual checks going out to members during the coronavirus crisis.

On average, SAG-AFTRA processes 90,000 to 100,000 residuals checks a week, intaking, scanning and remailing to members or their agents the vital funds that help sustain working and middle-class actors between gigs. And in an extraordinary week, with acting jobs nowhere to be found and national unemployment filings across all industries spiking sixteen-fold to an unprecedented 3.3 million, those monies are all the more essential.

On Friday, March 20, Paradigm Talent Agency announced to its staff that it would be conducting mass “temporary” layoffs as the live music industry stares down a year of uncertainty due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A source close to the situation tells Pitchfork that the layoff terms do not include severance.

In an unusual — but under the circumstances, unsurprising — move, SAG-AFTRA’s approximately 80-member board of directors voted 93.73 percent to 6.27 percent to delegate all of its authority to the organization’s executive committee due to the impossibility of holding in-person meetings during the coronavirus pandemic and the impracticality of holding large meetings even electronically, the union announced Tuesday.

Citing the coronavirus pandemic, SAG-AFTRA’s 80-member board of directors has delegated its authority to its 38-member executive committee.

Employees at the Hollywood talent agency UTA (United Talent Agency) will be taking pay cuts during the current health crisis that is facing the world.

SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris has issued a video detailing the union’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.