New Animation Guild Contract Deal

The Animation Guild, Local 839 IATSE came to a tentative agreement with the AMPTP a week back, and it is now hitting the trades...

The Animation Guild and management’s AMPTP have reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year film and TV contract, although an actors’ strike against the TV animation industry is still a possibility. Members of SAG-AFTRA voted overwhelmingly in July to authorize a strike if their negotiators failed to reach a satisfactory agreement, although contract talks resumed last week. The key sticking point in those talks has been SAG-AFTRA’s demand for scale wages and residuals for shows aired on streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.

The Animation Guild will detail how the talks went and what was achieved at the General Membership Meeting (held at Burbank's Pickwick Gardens) the last Tuesday of September. My information is that significant improvements were made.

The guild spent over a year preparing for talks that came after the end of protracted IA-AMPTP negotiations for a new Basic Agreement. Negotiations ultimately took five long days (four were originally scheduled). From reports, there were no significant concessions on labor's side and TAG got improvements in rates and schedules in different job classifications.

When TAG releases details of the contract deal, I will put them up here.