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A Letter from Sally Field

Dear Fellow SAG Members:

In the 43 years I've been a member, I've never before doubted our union's leadership. I respected the dedication of members volunteering for board service and trusted them to effectively represent our interests as performers. But recent actions of the Hollywood Board have destroyed my faith.

With the most important contract negotiation in years pending, those Board members - or more accurately, the overwhelming majority who call themselves "Membership First" - decided to go to war with AFTRA, our sister union. They threatened to end the longstanding practice of negotiating the TV/Theatrical contract together and launched an attack on AFTRA in the press, with one Membership First Board member going so far as to publicly call AFTRA "a scumbag union."

Ultimately, they were forced to withdraw their referendum threatening to end joint negotiation, after receiving a storm of criticism from SAG members who said that going it alone would weaken our position at the bargaining table. But their hostility toward AFTRA continued, and AFTRA finally decided it couldn't trust SAG enough to negotiate the contract together.

And so here we are, negotiating on our own with diminished leverage against a united front of media conglomerates. Is this what we want for our future?

If this leadership stays in place, the bad relations with AFTRA will persist, and we'll continue to negotiate contracts from a position of division and weakness. With the commercials contract up for negotiation in October, that dismal prospect is just around the corner.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Next month, you'll have the opportunity to change SAG'S leadership by electing 33 new members to the Board of Directors. A group of smart, dedicated SAG members who are as troubled as I am by the divisive policies of the current leadership are running for the board. Elect them and we'll have SAG leadership that will end the senseless war with AFTRA and start building a united front of actors to fight for more working opportunities and better pay.

With the rise of huge media conglomerates and the accelerating transformation of our industry by new technologies, actors face huge and growing challenges. We just can't afford to be divided now. Join me in electing new leadership that understands strength at the bargaining table comes through unity.

Please visit www.UniteforStrength.com for more details. And when your ballot arrives, please vote for the Unite for Strength candidates.

For strength through unity,
Sally Field

 A Letter from Peter Coyote

Dear Fellow SAG Members,

I am extremely heartened by the slate of candidates who have come together to fight for change under the banner Unite For Strength. Click on their photos, and you will be taken to their IMBD.com pages. You’ll be impressed by the strength and depth of their resumes. These are people who are actively, intimately and consistently involved with our craft; who understand the issues affecting the long-term health of the performance community. These working professionals are the kind of people I trust to lead our union and deal with the multiplicity of problems besetting us.

We need to elect all of them. We need an honest to goodness re-evolution in our union and can only do that with a solid majority. Please contribute to help defray the costs of this campaign. The stakes are high. You all know (or should know) what we’ve lost these last several years. It’s time to make a change and it’s time, finally, to Unite for Strength.

Thank you very much,
Peter Coyote