Inside the Long, Strange Labour Battle by BC Actors

The actors in Ellie Harvie’s union count on commercials to pay their bills.

But for more than 13 months, they’ve barely been called to make any.

Harvie, the president of the B.C. wing of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, or ACTRA, is one of thousands of unionized Canadian actors locked in a labour dispute with some of the country’s biggest advertising agencies.

The actors, some of whom depend on income from commercials, have been unable to work on ads for some of Canada’s largest brands, including Canadian Tire and the federal government.

“I have actors coming up to me saying they just want to work,” said Harvie.

The dispute is made more complicated by the fact the two parties have radically different versions of how negotiations fell apart, or how to fix them.

The only thing the parties do agree on is that it has gone on far too long, leaving thousands of working performers without a crucial source of cash.

“This has been a tough haul,” said Eleanor Noble, national president of ACTRA.

A breakdown, then finger pointing

The trouble began in April 2022 when negotiations between ACTRA and the Institute of Canadian Agencies, or ICA, reached an impasse. The institute is an umbrella group for 16 of Canada’s largest advertising, marketing and public relations agencies.

Commercial actors are the original gig workers. They might work a score of projects for different companies in a given year, all at different workplaces.

Because of that, their collective agreements aren’t negotiated with individual advertising agencies. Instead, ACTRA negotiates at a central table with the ICA and the Association of Canadian Advertisers.

The result is the National Commercial Agreement, a 244-page collective agreement that determines how union actors are paid and treated.

Last year the ICA walked away from those negotiations.

ICA and ACTRA disagree on virtually every part of what happened next — and even on what to call their fight.

ACTRA says the ICA member agencies have locked out their members and denied them work.

Noble said the ICA wanted provisions in their National Commercial Agreement that would give agencies the option of hiring non-union workers.

“They claim that they want to be more competitive in the market and hiring non-union is better for them to save money because they’re so expensive. I think it’s a shame,” said Noble, herself a working actor.

Noble said the loss of that commercial work hit many ACTRA members hard. Some make their living off commercials, she said, while other TV and film actors count on it to supplement their income between other productions.

“Some people live solely off of doing commercials and they make a terrific income,” Noble said.

Scott Knox, the executive director of the ICA, agrees actors are suffering. But he says it is ACTRA and not his organization that forbid those performers from working on ICA productions.

“This is not a lockout by the ICA. This is a lockdown by ACTRA,” Knox said.

Knox said the ICA did not ask for the ability to opt out of using union workers nor did they propose a wage cut. He says it actually offered an increase of eight per cent.

A growing pool of non-unionized actors

Knox says the root of the dispute is in the large and growing world of non-union commercial acting work.

In the early 2000s, Harvie says, most acting work in British Columbia was unionized.

But since then, a growing number of American companies — the province’s biggest customers — began to hire non-union actors to make commercials that played in the United States. Those companies are not part of the National Commercial Agreement.

The solution agreed to by all parties was a 2008 amendment to the national agreement. Under that amendment, American agencies producing their commercials in this country could hire ACTRA members without signing the agreement. The intent was to let ACTRA members benefit from those lucrative contracts.

But ACTRA says some Canadian companies have used that amendment to sidestep the collective agreement.

Often those companies will use a payroll firm with a foreign headquarters as a proxy. That allows them to hire ACTRA talent without signing the NCA, which Knox argues means they undercut Canadian firms that respect the agreement.

“The whole premise of this agreement that was set up in the 1960s was to give commercial advantages to the agencies that would become partners of ACTRA,” Knox said.

It’s fine to exempt commercials produced by agencies outside of Canada, he said. “But when you start offering that as the route to Canadian advertising agencies, what you do is allow that agency to pick and use whether it uses ACTRA or not.”

Instead, Knox said the current system means his member agencies are actually at a material disadvantage.

“What they have done is they have blocked us from being able to use the backdoor that they created,” Knox said.

How big a loophole?

ACTRA says it is true some Canadian brands have managed to use that exemption unduly and there is a growing sector of non-union commercial work in Canada.

But it says the number of companies that have taken advantage of that loophole is far smaller than what Knox suggests. They also say it is not true that the ICA proposed any measures to close that loophole or that they offered a salary increase to ACTRA performers.

In January, the parties met again at the bargaining table in an effort to break the deadlock, without success.

Carol Taverner, an ACTRA spokeswoman, said it exchanged written proposals with the ICA where that group continued to request the ability for its member agencies to work with both union and non-union performers.

Harvie said the union’s worry is that agreeing that ground will push down workers’ salaries and make conditions even more precarious.

She estimates most commercial acting work in British Columbia today is not unionized. But commercials remain important for her members and are an even more important source of income in Toronto and other acting markets in Eastern Canada.

“In B.C., there’s now a huge pool of talented, non-union people. What’s happening in Toronto is that there’s this huge pool of non-union talent. And producers are saying we can just pay them whatever we want,” Harvie said.

“If you want to work just commercials, there is a non-union world.”

Harvie said her branch has tried to persuade more non-union actors to join ACTRA. Previously, non-union performers in B.C. could work on ACTRA sets by purchasing a day pass.

Last year, ACTRA introduced a rule requiring those actors to join the union after buying three passes, Harvie said. She said they added 500 new members in December alone.

Today, many are still looking for work.

“I think the approach form the ICA to this has been laughable. It has been clear from day one that they had one intention and it was busting the union.”