The board of the Screen Actors Guild on Monday ousted the guild’s chief negotiator and national executive director, Doug Allen.
Allen, who had strongly backed a strike vote until recent attempts to fire him, notified the guild executive staff in an e-mail Monday that “the national board has terminated my employment” and wished the guild well.
The move makes the prospects of an actors’ strike extremely remote and will likely hasten an agreement with studios on a movie and prime-time TV contract that expired last June. Actors have been working since then under the terms of the expired deal.
“The threat-o-meter has gone way down,” said Jonathan Handel, an entertainment lawyer who has followed the labor strife closely. “There’s still work to be done, but this is the dawn of a new era for SAG.”
The move to oust Allen follows months of turmoil at the guild over whether to hold a strike vote, and a contentious meeting two weeks ago when a group representing the majority on the board tried to fire Allen but failed because of filibustering by other members.
Anne-Marie Johnson, the guild’s first vice president, said board members making up 52.5 percent of the voting rights on the 71-member board signed a document making the move. Guild lawyers authenticated the document, she said.
It was an unusual procedure but not surprising in the wake of the last full board meeting, in which members of a hardline Hollywood group known as Membership First, led by President Alan Rosenberg, delayed a vote on Allen’s ouster in a 28-hour marathon session using procedural delays.
It also followed a glitzy evening at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, where collegiality replaced public bickering between high-profile actors on both sides of the dispute.
Allen, a former NFL linebacker and NFL Players Association assistant executive director, will be replaced by former guild general counsel David White as interim national executive director, the group said. Veteran guild staffer John McGuire will take over as lead negotiator, with a smaller negotiating team supporting him.
White is expected to start work as early as Tuesday and move quickly to reopen talks with the studios.
The studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, declined to comment.
Johnson said Allen will be paid his full $500,000 annual salary for the year remaining in his three-year contract. He joined the guild in January 2007.
Late last year, as talks with major Hollywood studios ground to a halt, the guild maintained the studios’ final offer was unacceptable because it failed to guarantee guild coverage in productions made for the Internet, failed to make residual payments on made-for-Internet content that is rerun online, and didn’t protect actor benefits in unforeseen work stoppages.
But support for a strike vote waned quickly as the economy soured. High-profile actors lobbied on both sides of the issue, fraying efforts at building a consensus within the 120,000-member union.
SAG is the last holdout among several unions that have agreed to a new long-term contract with the studios, including directors, a smaller actors union, and writers, whose 100-day strike last year helped forge template terms in new media that other unions later accepted.
The studios have said their final offer added $250 million in additional payments for actors, but that SAG had foregone $48 million in increases by not accepting the deal by mid-August.
Apple and Google Face UK Investigation Into Mobile Browser Dominance
Apple and Google aren't giving consumers a genuine choice of mobile web browsers, a British watchdog said Friday in a report that recommends they face an investigation under new U.K. digital rules taking effect next year.
The Competition and Markets Authority took aim at Apple, saying the iPhone maker's tactics hold back innovation by stopping rivals from giving users new features like faster webpage loading. Apple does this by restricting progressive web apps, which don't need to be downloaded from an app store and aren't subject to app store commissions, the report said.
"This technology is not able to fully take off on iOS devices," the watchdog said in a provisional report on its investigation into mobile browsers that it opened after an initial study concluded that Apple and Google effectively have a chokehold on "mobile ecosystems."
The CMA's report also found that Apple and Google manipulate the choices given to mobile phone users to make their own browsers "the clearest or easiest option."
And it said that the a revenue-sharing deal between the two U.S. Big Tech companies "significantly reduces their financial incentives" to compete in mobile browsers on Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones.
Both companies said they will "engage constructively" with the CMA.
Apple said it disagreed with the findings and said it was concerned that the recommendations would undermine user privacy and security.
Google said the openness of its Android mobile operating system "has helped to expand choice, reduce prices and democratize access to smartphones and apps" and that it's "committed to open platforms that empower consumers."
It's the latest move by regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to crack down on the... Read More