Wilshire Stages Says
“Union Yes”

by Tris Carpenter, National Organizer

You can’t lead a horse to water, but you can make him drink. Let me tell you how our members turned an old saying around by organizing a sound company here in Los Angeles, and about the obstacles they overcame to make that happen.

In the May/June issue, I described how Guild members had helped organize a non-union

Many sound facilities now compete on price rather than quality. Organizing efforts like this one can help stop that downward spiral.

sound house by signing Authorization Cards. That facility was Wilshire Stages, and I can now reveal the whole story of that campaign.

By all accounts, Wilshire may have the best independently owned stages in Los Angeles. Though the company was near financial ruin just a few years ago, their reputation for excellent work spread, and they now have many satisfied clients. There has been much hard work behind their climb, but a facility of this quality cannot exist solely in the shark-infested waters of low-budget, non-union filmmaking.

“In the end, all the major studios and all the major motion pictures are union signatories,” said Chris David, a Guild re-recording mixer working freelance at Wilshire. “We live and work in one of the highest stress industries there is, with companies that are relentlessly demanding and will take whatever they can, whenever they can, without giving anything back. My union membership is my insurance policy.”

Other union members who were at the facility put it differently. “It’s our craft, and we need to take back control of it,” said Cathy Speakman, a supervising sound editor. “We need to change the fundamental structure of post-production sound. We have to fight the downward pressure on sound budgets and wages from non-union shops by organizing them. Right now, companies are competing based on who can pay the lowest wages, rather than on style and quality.”

This downscale market causes problems not only for the employer, but for the employees. Why not get out of this race to the bottom, and instead find customers willing to pay for quality work? The obvious choice was to organize and, in doing so, pressure management to compete for the better funded union shows.

So what needed to be done? “To organize a facility requires that a simple majority of the employees wish to have the union represent them in negotiations with management,” David said. “A quick check showed 45 people who qualified as employees under the NLRB definition. [Someone who has worked at the company within the previous year.] It looked as if we could get a ‘yes’ vote from about 30 of these, most of them union members already. But were we home free? Don’t you believe it!”

A number of people who had never been union members needed to learn about the benefits of the Guild. With the help of the Guild staff, our members found ways to approach nearly every employee at Wilshire Stages. Once we had enlisted the support of a solid majority (and got those cards signed!), we approached management to see if they would grant us recognition and begin negotiating a contract.

Because of their financial concerns, management asked for some time to reorganize their business holdings. Subsequently, they sold off their sound editing division, EFX, to Soundstorm in Burbank. Since Soundstorm is already a union signatory, those employees who went with the transfer began working union. We were halfway to our goal.

Next, we filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election for the remaining employees. The NLRB agreed to hold a secret ballot election six weeks later. The fight to persuade the majority of the employees to support the Guild was on.

While this all sounds easy, you should know that from the beginning, the strategic opposition was intense. Management claimed that over two-thirds of the entire staff was ineligible to vote because they were supposedly “temporary” or “contracted” employees. This interesting interpretation of the law attempted to draw parallels between Wilshire’s union employees (hired and directed by Wilshire management but paid through a union payroll company) and workers more commonly thought of as contracted, such as janitors at a city office high-rise, who work for an outside janitorial service under contract to the building owners.

We were confident that, in time, this attempt to disenfranchise almost 30 employees through a legal loophole would ultimately be overturned in court. But the determination and confidence of our supporters at Wilshire was very high, and we decided to take a gamble — we would proceed with the election involving the smaller, remaining group. This meant that about nine employees (all of whom happened to be non-union) would cast uncontested votes; the Guild reserved the right to litigate the eligibility of any other voters who appeared at the election but were contested by management as “contracted” employees.

The financial issues were staked out in dramatic fashion, too. Management, in fact, argued that going union would increase costs and put them out of business.

But going union has a huge upside. “The company had been losing money, yet we were equipped and potentially staffed for higher budget, higher standard productions,” David said. “These earn a more decent room rate, which provides for both our union rates of pay and benefits, and for a better bottom line for owners and management. Even though these films are more demanding on the facility, there is enough of an improvement to turn a loss into break-even or better. If we want to play in the big leagues, we need to respect the union agreement.”

The most important (and inspiring) part of this story is the role played by our members. They carried this campaign from start to finish. From the inside, our members created a consensus that the company should be a signatory. When it came time to vote, our members who met the voter eligibility requirements traveled from all over the area to cast their ballots in support of the Guild.

Even in the face of legal challenges, our supporters stood their ground. Of the nine employees who could cast uncontested ballots, eight voted. The final tally was 6-2 in favor of joining the Guild. Nearly 20 other votes were also cast, but management contested them. Most of those votes were cast by Guild supporters, but with the vote already in the bag, we dropped the legal challenge and accepted the victory.

How does it look for the future? “I personally am looking forward to always working with competent union engineers and back room crews,” David said. “To not coming in at 8:30 a.m. to find that my recordist from yesterday has not been home nor had any sleep, as he prepares the room for our day’s work. To proper meal breaks for the back room. For contributions to our health and welfare and pension funds. To not getting recordists on major motion pictures straight out of film school. But most of all to being able to bring my union projects there.”

Union organizing means using our collective power to create working environments where people can develop, sustain and protect a lifelong career doing the work they love at the highest artistic level possible. There are certainly more battles to be fought — but our success at Wilshire Stages shows how the Guild and the members, working together, can bring about powerful changes. We turned an important non-union facility into a place where our members can now work under contract. With your help, we’ll continue to do this at facilities all over town.