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Canada: End the Lockout, Get 28,000 Actors Back to Work
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| In partnership with ACTRA and ACTRA Toronto. ACTRA (Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists) is the national union of over 28,000 professional performers working in English-language recorded media in Canada, including TV, film, radio, and digital media. We are actors, recording artists, comedians, announcers, stunt co-ordinators and performers, dancers, narrators, voice performers, hosts, choreographers, models, singers, background performers, puppeteers and more. There are 9 branches of ACTRA across Canada, and ACTRA Toronto is the largest with 15,000 of the 28,000 members in the country. |
Over 28,000 ACTRA members, actors and other performers, are the target of one of the largest lockouts in Canada’s history.
Their employer, the Institute of Canadian Agencies (ICA), is an umbrella organization representing Canadian advertising agencies. Some of their clients include the Canadian government and corporations like Walmart, Google and MacDonald’s. For over 60 years, ACTRA and the ICA have been parties to a collective agreement covering radio and TV advertising.
Last spring ICA came to the table with proposals that would have reduced wages by 60% and completely gutted benefits, even eliminating the retirement plan. This despite the fact that actors constitute only about 2% of the cost of producing the average commercial. Clearly this is an attempt to convert wages into profits. And to break the union.
While a few of the actors are big names that many of us would recognize, the vast majority are working actors who earn a large proportion of their income from commercials. They are also precarious workers, employed on a gig-by-gig basis, no different than rideshare or food delivery workers and with similar annual incomes.
So please support ACTRA; help end the lockout by sending the message below.
