TV Commercial Production Workers Group on Track to Form National Union With IATSE
The grassroots group known as Stand With Production — which includes TV commercial production assistants, assistant production supervisors, production supervisors, line producers and bidding producers — is on track to form a national union with IATSE.
A majority of an estimated 5,000 TV commercial production workers signed union cards indicating their support for joining IATSE, which will require the Association of Independent Commercial Producers to voluntarily recognize the group per a previously agreed-to neutrality agreement. IATSE, which announced the news Tuesday, stated the the group is set to become “the largest contingent of production department workers and entry level production assistants within IATSE.”
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In a statement, IATSE international president Matthew Loeb said, “From the beginning, the Stand With Production movement has been about finding a way to open a dialogue with the powers that be and codify those solutions into written agreements. That will now become a reality for thousands of workers.“
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, AICP president and CEO Matt Miller said, “We entered a democratic process where we gave employees and the union the opportunity to demonstrate that a majority of people actually wanted to be represented by this union. They did demonstrate it and now we will meet with the union to try to find an equitable arrangement that works for both us and them.”
The Stand With Production group went public with its initiative a year ago, seeking to form a national union and looking for voluntary recognition from the AICP.
The AICP, which bargains on behalf of companies that produce commercials in labor negotiations, initially resisted, with Miller suggesting “areas of concern” regarding the unionization effort, including his projections that the Stand With Production effort could result in the eradication of jobs and income for these workers and “currently represented IATSE crew,” runaway production to other countries and “work rules agreements and overly restrictive jurisdictional boundaries.”
However, in October 2022 the AICP had inked a neutrality agreement with IATSE over the unionization effort, essentially promising to voluntarily recognize the group if a majority of workers signed union cards verified by a third-party arbitrator. Workers were eligible if they had worked two applicable jobs on AICP projects in the past 12 months.
As THR reported in the summer of 2022, the Stand With Production group began with a walk-off of production workers, the COVID compliance team and the script supervisor on a commercial for a major tech company in the fall of 2021. Erin Wile and Cheyenne Cage, whose walk-off over working conditions inspired others to do the same on the commercial, received so many emails and phone calls about the demonstration that they began organizing virtual “town halls” to discuss the situation of production workers on commercials. Eventually, after the Wile- and Cage-led group released a set of labor standards that it believed the industry should adhere to, it began exploring the prospect of unionization and connected with IATSE, which represented other crewmembers on TV commercials. “It’s an unusual but welcome thing for this level of organization to exist prior to an actual unionization campaign,” a source close to the union told THR in July 2022 of the Stand With Production group.
In a call on Tuesday, Wile and Cage called the development that their group had won a majority “surreal.” Said Cage, “Today I think is the first day it’s starting to settle in and feel like we actually did this.”
The pair note that the final stage of the organizing process involved workers filling out and sending their union cards through a mail-based verification system. Because there were some attendant issues, such as letters getting lost in the mail or being sent to old addresses, a group of around 30 to 40 volunteers phone banked to reach out to every member in the potential bargaining unit and determine if they received the letter, also encouraging them to return them on time. “I feel like we were Sisyphus in this process so many times, pushing the boulder up the hill, and this was like our last final hurdle,” says Cage.
The Stand With Production effort marked IATSE’s second attempt to unionize commercial production workers in the recent past. A few years ago, production supervisors, assistant production supervisors and IATSE Local 871 attempted to get these workers covered under a sideletter in the latter’s commercials agreement, an attempt that eventually failed.
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