Notes From the National Board Member

Fall light leans into the landscape, burnishing it with a kind of “welcome home,” doesn’t it? For some, it’s time to come back from vacation or get ready for school. Others have a harvest to reap. All of us know in our bones that the season invites us back from summer’s wandering, calls us to readiness for autumn, and from there to winter’s chill.

“Home” is more than an idea in the ethos of your SAG-AFTRA Portland Local Board. It is a place in our hearts and on our minds that we care for, enlarge and maintain for our members, and for those working toward becoming one. 

This is why we are dedicated to making our union house as capacious as we can, and our reason for the small tent (union only) and big tent (everyone’s welcome) events we hold for members, potential members, employers and potential employers.

You see, the more brothers and sisters we welcome in, the stronger we all are in terms of organizing emerging categories and increasing present ones, supporting film and series work, promulgating contracts, flipping jobs, providing a fearsome army for strikes, creating a community for our mutual support in good times and bad, maintaining fully funded pension and health plans and, of course, ensuring a powerful partnership with national SAG-AFTRA and our sisters and brothers nationwide.

On that note, did you know that member population has a direct effect on the number of reps on the SAG-AFTRA National Board? The more members a local has, the more National Board members it has, thus amplifying that local’s representation.

In our house, we also welcome the employers who create work for our members. We take care of our friendships with extant employers: These are the Portland and SW Washington industry partners we see on set, in the studio, at the Oregon Governor’s Office of Film & Television events, in Salem on Industry Day, and at OMPA and AFL-CIO gatherings. 

We always keep a light in the window for new signatories to our contracts too, guiding them to become signers to the appropriate contracts: commercials, theatrical, broadcast and so on. Other ways we strive to grow work include activity, group and one-on-one events that attract, educate and create new signatories.

All of this is designed to keep our SAG-AFTRA home healthy, with room for everyone.

In this sense, we are amplifying national’s goals to grow the family. This is why, pre-pandemic, national has its higher ed programs, which send union members into schools to introduce budding pre-union members to our family. In the same way, its big tent events, open to all comers, are also offered as a way of introducing potential members to SAG-AFTRA. Similar events have been offered virtually as we have waited out the virus. As your representative on the national board, I have been advocating for a return to these face-to-face events as soon as possible. Your National staff and elected brothers and sisters nationwide hope for the same thing — and soon!  In Portland, now that we’re back to work, new members are also reached via our low budget and student contracts — these contracts serve both goals: to grow members and employers; a win-win! 

Locally, you can look forward to both small tent and big tent events here in the coming months. We sure hope you’ll come.

Joining SAG-AFTRA is a pinnacle of professional accomplishment, one you should be very proud of. Now you must abide by Global Rule One: to never work off the card. Rule Two, in my opinion, is to hold the front door open for the fellow behind you and help him walk into our house. Despite the very realistic and reasonable high demands of entry, we are not an exclusive club; we are a steel-sided trade labor organization with loyalty, first and foremost, to each other. We hold this truth to be self-evident because any other position cannot stand within our union. If this truth were to be ignored, within a generation there would be no union at all.

I mentioned winter’s chill earlier. We know Portland can be dark and dank during the brumal season. But so long as we have each other — so long as there is room for everyone at the fire in the hearth — we are warm and we are safe.

Welcome home.

By Mary McDonald-Lewis for the Portland Local newsletter.