IATSE union: Will strike Monday if no deal is reached

A union that represents roughly 150,000 entertainment workers gave Hollywood companies an ultimatum Wednesday: You have five days to address demands about rest periods, meal breaks and pay before a strike begins.

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees said members would begin walking picket lines Monday — halting production in Hollywood — unless an agreement was reached for a new contract that covers about 60,000 members. The previous three-year contract expired in July. Renewal negotiations started in May and stalled Sept. 20, when studios declined to counter the union’s most recent proposal, and IATSE, as the union is known, sought strike authorization from members. The results of the authorization vote, announced last week, were absolute. Nearly 99% of the votes were in favor of a strike.

Talks immediately resumed between IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a bargaining entity for studios, including Amazon, Apple and Netflix. But there has been little movement.

“The pace of bargaining doesn’t reflect any sense of urgency,” Matthew Loeb, the union’s president, said in a statement. “Without an end date, we could keep talking forever. Our members deserve to have their basic needs addressed now.”

A spokesman for the studio alliance, Jarryd Gonzales, said in an email, “There are five whole days left to reach a deal, and the studios will continue to negotiate in good faith in an effort to reach an agreement for a new contract that will keep the industry working.”

IATSE represents camera operators, cinematographers, script coordinators, prop makers, set builders, editors, makeup artists and other behind-the-scenes specialists. Members are asking for longer rest periods between shifts and on weekends, better pay for streaming-service work, higher wages for coordinators and assistants on all productions, and strengthened requirements for meal breaks during marathon shoots.

When writers struck in 2007, studios used a backlog of scripts to keep shooting. If IATSE walks out, production would halt almost immediately: You can’t do much of anything in Hollywood without a camera operator.