Commercial Production Workers Ratify First Union Contract

After years of organizing, production workers on commercials have negotiated their first union contract.

The Production Workers Guild (IATSE Local 111), which emerged from a sprawling grassroots campaign that culminated in a national union two years ago, officially ratified its first contract with the Association of Independent Commercial Producers on Tuesday. Results of the ratification vote were not immediately available.

The new contract brings workers working in an array of production roles up to par with their unionized colleagues in other departments on meal penalties, safety procedures, travel day compensation and call cancellation policies.

The deal also breaks new ground on issues specific to this group. It gets rid of “exempt” classifications, with overtime and holiday contract language applying to every member. It lowers the threshold for union members to gain access to their health plan from 100 days to 80 days and authorizes those working for union signatory companies that are not a part of the AICP to get one year of health coverage. Any requirements for workers to use their own bank accounts for petty cash or wire transfers are banned, and union members cannot be held liable for petty cash variances out of their control under the terms of the contract.

Turnaround time contract language, guaranteed daily cell phone reimbursement and the ability for members to be paid through their loan-out companies are also included.

Local 111 national chair Chris Valdez told The Hollywood Reporter that the deal’s significance is all about “safety, safety, safety.” He explained, “The big motivation for this movement and organizing was we were working without any kind of safeties in terms of turnaround and things like that, and we had a lot of folks that were getting worked pretty hard into some dangerous territory as far as hours. So now we have on-par amenities with the CPA [IATSE’s commercial production agreement]… That’s the biggest win, is we have guardrails going forward within our department.”

The contract applies to around 5,000 workers across hundreds of production companies, according to the union. Production assistants, production supervisors, assistant production supervisors, line producers and bidding producers are all subject to the new deal.

“This ratified agreement is the culmination of four years of activism and organizing born out of the grassroots ‘Stand With Production’ movement,” IATSE international president Matthew D. Loeb said in a statement. “This first agreement sets a foundation that we will look to build upon for the future, with talks for a successor agreement just three years away.” THR has reached out to the AICP for comment.

In 2021, a walkoff of commercial production workers on a difficult multimillion-dollar ad campaign for a tech company sparked a larger grassroots movement. The group, “Stand With Production,” began hosting meetings on Zoom for colleagues and ultimately started attempting to build a union. IATSE joined the effort officially in 2022 and a card count led to the certification of the union the next year.

Cheyenne Cage and Erin Wile were two production workers that took part in the original commercial walkoff and became key organizers of the unionizing effort. In a statement on Thursday, Cage and Wile looked back at what the deal means. They said that while no first contracts are perfect, the deal “lays an essential foundation for the future” and “marks the first large-scale representation of production assistants anywhere in the entertainment industry, and we see it as a historic step forward.”