STRIKE VOTE CERTAIN, SAY SAG LEADERS

The leaders of the Screen Actors Guild said Monday that they are confident the union's membership will vote to authorize a strike despite current economic conditions. "No matter how hard times are, you can't let fear and apprehension prompt you to trade away the future," SAG President Alan Rosenberg told Reuters. Union negotiators last week asked the union's governing board to decide whether to call for a strike authorization vote at its meeting scheduled for October 18. Rosenberg and Doug Allen, the union's executive director, noted in their interview with the wire service that the union was founded in 1933 in the midst of the Depression. But critics both within the union and outside of it have argued that a strike would cost union members far more than they could hope to gain if producers eventually acceded to their demands on new media issues.

07/10/2008