A Message from AFTRA Second National Vice President Ron Morgan

Posted March 02, 2010

Dear AFTRA members:

If you’ve been following AFTRA on our newly redesigned Web site, on Facebook or on Twitter, or if you read our AFTRA Flash notices, Take Action Alerts, AFTRA magazine or your Local newsletter and other communications, you’ve no doubt heard quite a lot about AFTRA members working together through our union to improve our jobs, lives and communities.

Every day and across the nation, AFTRA members are working together in a multitude of career and job enhancement workshops, seminars, educational programs and other special events. These programs enable professional performers, broadcast journalists and recording artists to learn from each other, build solidarity as union members working in various fields and learn important techniques and tools to help us excel at our crafts and in our workplaces.

Here’s just a small sample of the kinds of member education programs sponsored or hosted by AFTRA around the country: 

• The AFTRA New York Local’s AFTRA@Work program trains working members on the business and craft of working in our industries with workshops like, “Learn the Business of Acting,” “Knock ‘Em Dead Without Killing Your Voice” and “Networking: How to Attract the Very People You Need to Meet,” among others.
• AFTRA Nashville recently opened a new Pro-Tools Studio at the Local office as a resource for members to rehearse and record voiceovers or sound recordings, and the Local has even started rolling out instructional classes to train members on the equipment.
• The AFTRA Texas Regional membership is busy with its own ongoing program of networking and career enhancement opportunities. Through events like “Third Thursdays” in Dallas/Fort Worth and the popular “Script to Screen” series in Austin, our members are transforming AFTRA in Texas into an important resource for professional union talent.
• AFTRA Cleveland’s “Hot Pizza/Cold Readings” Conservatory Workshop regularly gives AFTRA members an opportunity to gather for good food, networking and cold reading exercises.
• Here in Los Angeles, our AFTRA Member Education Department offers a dynamic series of programs and career development workshops and panels covering everything from equal employment opportunities and seniors and women’s issues, to scene studies, voiceover, makeup techniques and sight singing classes for singers. We recently hosted “Dancing Your Way to Success” put together by the members of the Dancers Committee.

Check your AFTRA Local Web site to learn about AFTRA-sponsored events in your area, or if you have an idea for a project or event and would like to pitch in and help out, contact your AFTRA Local office.

AFTRA members also work together on important labor and public policy issues through a variety of coalitions, partnerships, labor and industry associations at the local, national and international levels to positively affect change.  

• AFTRA representatives regularly attend meetings of the International Federation of Actors (FIA) with other union performers, from nations such as the United Kingdom, Morocco, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Spain, Latin America, to right here at home, to discuss common areas of interest and strategic approaches to organizing initiatives, emerging technologies and global legislative efforts.
• Notwithstanding our government’s intense focus on health care reform, AFTRA members are still working to push other important priorities such as the Employee Free Choice Act, the Performance Rights Act and the fight against Internet theft of intellectual property and copyrighted material – all initiatives that directly affect AFTRA members’ working lives and livelihoods.
• AFTRA members throughout the U.S. are working with their local AFL-CIO chapters and Central Labor councils on a variety of workers’ rights initiatives and organizing efforts affecting our brothers and sisters in the American Labor Movement, including organizing car wash employees and mine workers, among many others.

Of course, there is AFTRA’s core activity of building union density in each of our markets to maintain union standards and increasing job opportunities for professionals working in the entertainment and news media industries. You may have read this past weekend that the AFTRA National Board of Directors approved a new National AFTRA Public Television Agreement. AFTRA is also hard at work preparing for the upcoming Sound Recordings Code, Network Television Code “Front-of-the-Book,” the ABC Network Staff Newspersons Agreement and the CBS Network Staff News Agreement. In the coming weeks and months, you’ll be hearing more about preparations for these important contracts.

This all boils down to one simple, yet powerful principle: organizing. To bring about change in our jobs, lives and communities, AFTRA members must come together through our union to share ideas, learn from each other, learn from our friends and allies and build smart, strategic plans for moving us forward and getting the work done.

It’s all about members working together. Contact your AFTRA Local office, visit the AFTRA Web site, or follow AFTRA on Facebook and Twitter to find out how you can be part of the action and help shape some of exciting changes taking place in the studio, on the set, in the newsroom and throughout our industries.

In solidarity,

Ron Morgan
AFTRA Second National Vice President

AFTRA Partners