Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I hate to criticize my more sucessful East Coast doppelganger, but I’m a little confused by his proposal for a global film actors union, an SAG for the world. He points to the sad story of two child stars in Slumdog Millionaire who still live in slums and got paid very little for their very good work.

I don’t really see how their story relates to the struggles of actors all over the world. In India, they already have a film actors union. Would a worldwide SAG have impressed upon Boyle to hire their Indian actors at their rates?Anyway, a more feasible idea would be for the SAG to make it a condition of their next contract that studios who hire SAG actors can only hire Indian actors in the Bollywood union. This would strike me as a better idea, because there would be all sorts of logistical hassles with actually creating one, worldwide union that could adversely affect the relationships between Indian actors and their union. A good example of these sorts of problems would be setting the payscale. Obviously, Indian actors in India probably should get paid much less than actors in America. If the SAG didn’t realize this and set their worldwide payscale too high, that wouldn’t benefit anyone.

Dylan points to the possibility that without a worldwide union, actors in, say, Laos could get paid very little. Well, this is true, but until there is real evidence of a large number of Laotian actors actually getting exploited, I don’t think this hypothetical counts as evidence for the creation of a global labor behemoth.