As voting on IATSE contract ratification begins today, union members pressed leaders during a virtual town hall on Saturday for details on the AI provisions of the contract negotiated over the past four months with Hollywood’s major studios and streamers.
IATSE held a nearly three-hour session with IATSE International President Matthew Loeb and other leaders for the approximately 50,000 members of the 13 local residents who work under the Basic Agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, Variety has learned. IATSE members today began voting to ratify the three-year provisional agreement reached on June 26. IATSE leaders pledged earlier this year to have the new deal ratified before the current contract expires on July 31.
Guild members will vote until July 17 on whether to approve the contract. The results are expected to be announced on July 18.
Sources spoken to Variety are confident that the pact will be ratified this week. There is hope that a rapid transition will lead to an increase in employment, as production has been sluggish and many in the sector have been out of work for extended periods of time. The IATSE contract talks have been closely watched this year in the wake of last year’s lengthy strikes by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA.
On the thorny topic of AI, the focus is on how the technology will impact job retention. Loeb and members of the union’s contract bargaining committee made clear to members during the town hall that this deal is a starting point for how the union will handle the rapidly developing technology that promises to transform businesses. According to the terms of the Memorandum of Agreements, the Parties agree to meet at least semi-annually during the term of the Agreements at the request of the International Union to review information regarding the use and intended use of AI systems by the producers discuss and revise. ‘ and ‘each producer agrees to meet quarterly with the International Union, on a company-by-company basis, during the term of the respective agreements, at the request of the International Union. At such meeting, the Producer will identify any significant emerging technologies using AI systems that the Producer uses or plans to use in the production of motion pictures that may affect persons covered by these agreements. Topics include “the extent to which jobs may have been affected as a result of the use of AI systems.”
During the meeting, Variety has learned, union leaders have urged members to report their experiences to locals to determine what needs to be addressed; it also indicated that it could seek to have the AI part of future negotiations handled by each local party during the local and discipline-specific part of the negotiations. This time the AI component was negotiated at the end of the long process of local and national contracts. Because the members of the thirteen locals working under the Basic Agreement range from cinematographers and editors to art directors and set medics, AI is expected to impact different locals in different ways and at different times.
The powerful technology was, of course, already a hot topic before the preliminary agreement was formally released on July 10. A few days earlier, members of Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700), which includes editors, assistant editors, and sound editors and mixers – received an email from their leadership providing “further context” in light of “a few questions and concerns” that had been raised about the AI portion of the preliminary deal.
“Many of you are concerned about the prospect of a producer using your timelines, project files, concept art, or other expressions of your creative work to train AI models,” Cathy Repola, national director of Local 700, wrote in the e email of July 8. Through Variety. “While we were able to provide protections to prevent studios from abusing the cues you can give to AI models… I understand how important it is, and how important it is to you and your union, that your creative essence is not used is training AI models.” She continued that during the negotiations, “the studios repeatedly indicated that they were focused on, and most concerned about, potential legal action and lawsuits related to copyright violations. They are involved in legislative lobbying to create stronger protections, and these are their priorities. We repeatedly reiterated that we had no intention of allowing them to use IATSE members to train AI to eliminate our work, and they recognized the importance of this to us.”
Repola added that under the tentative agreement, “your work falls within the union’s jurisdiction regardless of the AI tool used. It is confirmed that our members who perform and/or supervise that work are subject to the jurisdiction of the collective bargaining agreements. Although the wording may differ from the WGA and SAG, the intent is essentially the same. Words in a collective bargaining agreement matter, but so does the intent and intention when disagreements arise.”
In the email, Repola emphasizes that the preliminary agreement includes the aforementioned meetings with AMPTP and individual producers/companies, as well as the importance of members reporting their experiences. “We still have a lot of work to do,” she wrote. “I truly believe that what we have achieved in these negotiations creates the foundation needed to build on for the future, not only until the next negotiations take place, but most importantly we have ensured that we do not have to wait for three years to wait. … You all play a crucial role in this. We want you to report everything related to the development of technologies so that we can collect the data necessary to effectively address the ongoing issues at these meetings. To achieve optimal success, we must work on this together.”
The Editors Guild is the second largest of the 13 Locals operating under the Basic Agreement. Because the ratification vote works similarly to an electoral college, this means that the International Cinematographers Guild (the largest local) and Editors Guild carry the most weight.