

Oppressive entertainers' union revealed
Click HERE for more posts about Financial Core StatusSAG says you join us and play by our rules or you don’t play. That was, until the 1988 Supreme Court landmark decision, Communication Workers v. Beck, which freed up union members’ options, and after which Charlton Heston contested SAG and Equity’s monopoly on the acting pool; resulting in the little-heard of, and much less talked about ruling known as Financial Core. Fi-Core for short.
I am often amazed at how few actors have heard about this right-to-work provision.

In a nutshell — filing Fi-Core allows you as an actor to work union or non-union productions. But you still pay dues. Or at least, you still pay 97% of your previous dues. SAG has determined, by some apparently random criteria that SAG earmarks only 3% to activities other than collective bargaining. (I hope no one was drinking anything while reading that; the spit-take could ruin your keyboard.) Once a SAG actor turns Fi-Core, henceforth you are referred to as a “dues-paying non-member.” (I am not making this up.) You maintain your pension status, your health care benefits, and except for a couple of minor changes, your acting career remains unchanged. The minor changes are these: You must fill out and sign a form stating you are resigning from SAG – the import of which means you can no longer vote in SAG elections and you no longer receive the high-quality, full-color-glossy monthly newsletter. I stopped to pause at that — deciding whether the six thousand dollars I was about to make acting in a certain G-rated non-union film for four days work would offset that terrible sacrifice.
A full second-and-a-half later, I resigned from SAG and filed Fi-Core. (Call me a whore.)

Now. Am I risking a lot telling you this? Probably. Hollywood is a union town. Union, union, union! To dissent from the lock-step is to paint the Scarlet ‘A’ on your non-union chest. The Leftist cabal that is primarily mainstream Hollywood will assuredly hate me, revile me, detest me, scorn me and want to wrap me in a booger burrito and take turns punting me over the Craft Service table for writing this. But I am about to reveal one of the tightest bits of insider info, one of the most closely guarded, oft-squelched facts in Hollywood:
Financial Core rocks!

SAG does not want you to know that Fi-Core even exists. Facts and information are terrible things to the Left status quo. What would that do for union-unified unity!? If people realized that they had more options, more choices, more rights to work…well it would be disastrous! It would lessen their ability to bargain as a tightly-knit union, it would lessen their impact on contract negotiations, it would…it would… it would reduce their power.
And in this or any other game…it’s all about power.
Once you file, here’s what happens: They try to talk you out of it. They tell you once you quit SAG, that’s it, you’re out. And if you persist, they sigh disparagingly and send you the forms, which you fill out and send back to them. Sometimes they call you back and try again to talk you out of it. But after you politely decline their offer, you actually sign a statement saying you are withdrawing from Screen Actors Guild. (Did I just hear a loud timpani roll?)

Now, maybe because it took so much for me to get into SAG in the first place… that one gave me quite a pause. But then I thought of my family and how much we needed the money, how much I wanted to do this particular role…and it was a no brainer. Boom, done. Fi-Core. That was maybe eight, nine years ago…and I’ve still managed to work steadily since. Union, non-union…whatever. Features, TV movies, non-union flicks, shorts, pilots, industry promos, web-series…some roles paying quite well, others not so well, some doodly-squat. But each time, I’d take the job for the love of acting, for the diversity and challenge of the role, and for getting to work with people I love.
No regrets…it’s all good.
(from
bighollywood.breitbart.com)