Screen Actors Guild — To Join or Not To Join?

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image credit: www.sag.com

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Deciding if and when to join the Screen Actors Guild is an important step in an actor’s career.

SAG, a union with over 118,000 members, has been protecting industry workers from potential abuses in the workplace for seventy years. SAG actors make more than double the wage of non-SAG actors, and are guaranteed the right to breaks, meals, and reasonable work hours and conditions. Membership also conveys to potential employers that an actor is serious about their work. The current initiation fee is $2,277, and annual fees are $116 plus a percentage of an actor’s total SAG earnings. If that doesn’t say “serious about my work”, nothing does, especially given that over 70% of SAG actors make less than $8000 a year.

It’s no surprise, then, that Wil Olandria has been struggling to decide whether or not he’ll join SAG. He was shocked when he heard the initiation fee had jumped $700, calling it “a surprising kick to the groin.” He was eligible when the fee was lower, having worked on an industrial piece for Hewlett Packard produced under a SAG contract, but had decided to wait.

Several so-you-want-to-be-an-actor books encourage aspiring professionals to wait to join until they must join, because once an actor signs up with SAG, they miss a lot of non-union work. “The key is to join when you feel you have built up enough of a body of work that you can show an agent,” Wil says, noting that agents “won’t even look at you if you aren’t part of SAG.” Finding an agent is one of Wil’s goals this year.

In the final analysis, Wil is glad he didn’t join SAG when he originally could have done so. “If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to be part of Brown Soup Thing.” His plan now is to do as much non-union work as he can and join SAG mid-summer.

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What’s Wil Watching?
Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig

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