The Screen Actors Guild’s strike-ending deal has entered its final step

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) reached a tentative deal with Hollywood studio executives, effectively ending the 118-day actors strike. Yesterday, SAG-AFTRA announced that its national board has approved the agreement, 86 percent to 14 percent, and recommended union members vote to ratify it.

The deal is still technically pending until union members’ vote is tallied on December 5th, though the guild says some of its features will go into effect during the ratification process, such as certain pay raises. SAG-AFTRA offered a summary of the deal in its announcement:

Deadline reported that the 86 percent support among the national board wasn’t as high as was expected and that it wasn’t clear how many voted against it because of the guild’s voting system.

Drescher discussed the drawn-out negotiations that led up to the deal in a press conference yesterday. She detailed the back-and-forth that saw the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers continually refusing the guild’s demands. She said the studios “heard that something had to be done, or this was not going to end well. So they worked internally to come up with some kind of modality” that would work for all of the studios — the bonus structure.

Drescher continued, saying that although the guild “knew that that wasn’t going to accomplish what we needed to accomplish,” she had to “wrap my mind around the fact that we needed to make this work if we were going to get into another pocket.” Ultimately, she said, “what mattered is that we got into another pocket and we did. I had to … wrap my mind around that and not make the perfect the enemy of the good.”