The smaller of Hollywood's two performers unions said its members have ratified a new prime-time TV contract, undermining a last-ditch bid by the larger, more militant Screen Actors Guild to secure a richer deal.
The pact with Hollywood's major film and TV studios covers 70,000 members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, and it won final approval despite an all-out campaign by SAG urging some 40,000 actors who belong to both unions to vote down the AFTRA accord.
"Despite an unprecedented disinformation campaign aimed at interfering with our ratification process, a majority of members ultimately focused on what mattered - the obvious merits of a labour agreement that contains substantial gains for every category of performer in both traditional and new media," AFTRA National President Roberta Reardon said in a statement.
Some of the AFTRA contract terms include a doubling of the rate for reuse fees, or "residuals," paid for TV shows sold as Internet downloads.
The contract also sets a new residual fee structure for advertising-supported online streaming of broadcast TV shows, and it requires studios to hire union actors when producing some forms of entertainment especially for new media.
Terms of the new AFTRA pact are essentially the same as those in the "final offer" the studios presented to SAG last Monday when talks broke off hours before their existing contract expired.
AFTRA leaders had warned that defeat of their contract settlement could lead to renewed labour unrest as Hollywood struggles to recover from a tumultuous 14-week strike by screenwriters that ended in February.
SAG issued a statement calling the AFTRA agreement "inadequate" and saying it would "continue to address the issues of importance to actors that AFTRA left on the table."
The studios' bargaining agent, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, also issued a statement calling the AFTRA ratification a "vote of confidence by actors in the agreement".
"We hope that SAG's Hollywood leadership will allow SAG members to vote on AMPTP's final offer," the statement said.
SAG has said it would formally respond to the AMPTP's final offer on Thursday.
