An 11-month long labour dispute between video game voice actors and 11 publishers over royalties reached its conclusion as an agreement was reached early on Saturday.
The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) called off the strike, which started in October last year, agreed to a new deal, which still needs to be approved by the labour union’s board of directors, which sees actors receiving bonus payments for the number of sessions done by the actors. This sees actors getting $75 (around R1001) for the first session and up to $2100 (around R28 000) for 10 sessions.
The publishers in question are Activision Publishing, Blindlight, Corps of Discovery Films, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Interactive Associates, Take-Two Interactive, VoiceWorks Productions and WB Games.
According to SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris,
“This is an important advance in this critical industry space. We secured a number of gains including for the first time, a secondary payment structure which was one of the members’ key concerns.”
As part of this deal is an employer commitment agreement with SAG-AFTRA to continuously work alongside the guild regarding vocal stress during the agreement period. It has been noted that actors had spent several hours screaming without any break periods which could have lead to permanent damage to the vocal cords. This was brought to the attention of publishers and developers, however, ignored these issues when proposing an agreement.
This agreement doesn’t include several recommendations made by SAG-AFTRA including an allocated fee for fining actors who arrive late or are distracted during a session, requiring agents to name actors for low-paying ‘atmospheric voice’ work or face fines.
The lead negotiator on this new agreement, chief contracts officer Ray Rodriguez commented that there are signs of improvements regarding transparency provisions.
“The new transparency provisions will enhance the bargaining power of our members’ representatives by requiring the companies to disclose the code name of project, its genre, whether the game is based on previously published intellectual property and whether the performer is reprising a prior role.”
He further expanded on how these provisions will protect the actors in the event of having to use obscene language and themes,
“Members are also protected by the disclosure of whether they will be required to use unusual terminology, profanity or racial slurs, whether there will be content of a sexual or violent nature and whether stunts will be required.”
The contract will be reviewed in October by the guild’s National Board at the next meeting.
