As reported by The Hollywood Reporter: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/teamsters-negotiations-lindsay-dougherty-ai-wages-1235918260/
On Monday, the latest wave of crew members will enter contract negotiations with Hollywood studios and streamers.
Following nearly three months of as-yet-unresolved IATSE negotiations, the Hollywood Basic Crafts coalition will begin targeted bargaining affecting drivers, location managers, electrical workers and other classifications. The group — which spans nearly 8,000 workers in the Teamsters Local 399, IBEW Local 40, LiUNA! Local 724, UA Local 78 and OPCMIA Local 755 — already started negotiating jointly with IATSE over benefits plans in March, but this current round of talks will drill down on other issues like wages, working conditions, artificial intelligence and, for the Teamsters, autonomous vehicles.
Leading the charge for the coalition will be Lindsay Dougherty, chairperson of the Hollywood Basic Crafts group and the principal officer of the Hollywood Teamsters, Local 399. “We’re looking to be more aggressive in this round of bargaining than the studios are used to seeing,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter of her approach to this year’s talks, which arrive just one year after her Local publicly backed the writers’ and actors’ strikes, with many Teamster trucks refusing to cross picket lines. Top issues will include higher wages, significant benefits funding, AI guardrails, staffing minimums and enhanced working conditions.
In an interview with THR on Saturday, Dougherty discussed her plans to push back against “pattern bargaining,” or when a negotiating party attempts to use a provision in one agreement as a template for another’s, and how she doesn’t plan on calling a strike authorization vote but isn’t “going to take any shit” either.
I would imagine the stakes feel fairly high given how many of your members were out of work last year during the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Are you feeling that pressure at all as a negotiator?
I think that in any negotiation as a negotiator, you’re feeling pressure because you’re there representing your members and you want to get the best contract possible. Our members deserve the best, and they always have. But it’s not even just the dual strikes last year where they have seen financial hardship — it’s throughout time with some of our working conditions not being [addressed] or certain wages not being increased. It’s even more imperative to get these changes in our contract, whether it’s increased wages or increased overtime provisions, because we have seen the slowdown impact a lot of our members that are currently out of work.
So yeah, I would say stakes are higher, but I feel like [for] our members enough is enough. They want to make a sustainable wage and be able to live in California, especially Southern California, and continue to do the job that they’ve done for years. It’s going to be a harder fight, but we just have to be tougher than ever before and more aggressive. I am ready for the challenge. And I think our negotiating team and our negotiating committee has done a lot of work and we’ve done a lot of preparation, so we’re definitely feeling confident going in.
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