Co-President's Reports

Rolf Burton, Co-President

Aloha SAG-AFTRA Hawaii. 2012 is the year two great unions, SAG and AFTRA, merged to create one powerful voice. Thank you to everyone who volunteered their time to help in the merger process. Our national union has made organizing work a priority. That means turning non-union work in Hawaii into union work. We all know that working on a SAG-AFTRA job guarantees a level of safety and fair wages that does not exist with non-union work. Quality work should result in better pay and safety on set. Any student film, low-budget movie or commercial can easily become SAG-AFTRA by going online to the SAG-AFTRA Production Center. Almost all of the paperwork can be done online. Any new or student director will be using SAG-AFTRA members at some point if they ever want to succeed. Oftentimes, projects start off non-union but during the auditioning process become union once the talent pool is evaluated. It's up to us, the performers, to encourage new directors to take advantage of these online resources. National Executive Director David White’s goal is to make it easy for directors and producers to work with SAG-AFTRA. One of our new mottos is, “Easy to work with, hard to fight.”

As co-presidents of the SAG-AFTRA Hawaii Local, Glenn Cannon and I are working together with our local board and national union to create the best working environment for Hawaii. It's important for us — that’s you — to educate yourselves so we can educate others. Call your union if you have a question. Find out for yourself what is truth and what is fiction on set. Look out for your union brothers and sisters on set. We have to help each other and support those who succeed from Hawaii’s Local. It's important for Hawaii members of SAG-AFTRA to put themselves in the best position to get a job. Take a class, attend SAG-AFTRA conservatory workshops, and work on your own to be your best when mainland companies come to town. Find a monologue or scene and work on it in your spare time. Performing is like running a marathon. You have to practice every day so that when you get that one audition every few months, you are ready to go. Try running a marathon without months of training.

Local actors have been getting great roles in recent productions. Let’s show the mainland that we deserve the big parts. Go Hawaii! Go SAG-AFTRA!

Glenn Cannon, Co-President

With the new SAG-AFTRA union in place, everyone should be pleased to be a part of one of the largest and most powerful entertainment unions in the country. I know I am, and since I've been a member of the original AFTRA since 1955 and SAG since 1957 (joined both when I was living and working as an actor in NYC), it feels very good indeed to see this hope and dream finally become a reality. The strength we now have to negotiate and set standards for actors, newspeople, announcers and all the other folks that come under this new performing umbrella will produce more work for all and far better work standards and salaries than previously.

We should begin to see that develop during the next rounds of negotiations with film and TV producers, networks, etc. This is not to say that there may not be some glitches on the road to a smooth-working set of structures. We all have to be patient as the new union works through its structural pains in establishing clear and definitive processes to deal with every exigency that occurs, some of them probably more annoying than others. Not to worry. The individuals that head up the national union in L.A. and NYC know what they are doing, as do those of us in Locals charged with doing the same for individual membership locations throughout the United States. Here in Hawaii, we are now a larger board, with Rolf Burton and me as co-presidents. We are all striving for the same goal: to make SAG-AFTRA the most effective union in our area of the country, and to work closely with L.A. and N.Y. in doing so.

We're rolling, folks, and it is gonna be just fine!

This item was originally featured in the July 2012 local newsletter.