Directors Union Reaches Tentative Deal With Hollywood Studios

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16. SAG-AFTRA here. I worked with a bunch of 'em. One station had ONLY IATSE people.

One network had only NABET people. They were all good, reliable, responsible, high-quality workers on the job. And many of them were fierce union supporters. Their unions were a lot more powerful and effective than I found AFTRA to be. When AFTRA merged with SAG I had high hopes, but it didn't seem to make much difference in "muscle-power". Especially as engineers were being phased out everywhere to spare management and upper management from having to pay them and negotiate salaries and benefits and all that.

You used to politely get your hand slapped if you touched the knobs. Toward the end of my time in that field, talent had to work ALL the knobs whenever they were in production or on the air. SHEESH - I remember the first week at one big station where we were making the switch to the air-talent handling all our own engineering. DAYUM, I went on the air with the first newscast of my shift, totally intimidated by that big mixing board in front of me, and the stack of carts I needed, over to the side of me. And at one point, while the mic was live, I reached over for another cart to load into the machine for the next story, and I accidentally knocked the whole stack over. BIG noise! Horrifying! Especially since that was the "Designated News Day" for the next Golden Mike competition. What saved me that day was that I had five newscasts to do, so maybe I'd have better luck getting a good submission for the Golden Mikes out of that day. And yeah, I did get lucky in that regard. But OOOOOOOH Lordy did I miss my engineer that day!