SAG-AFTRA has filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to recurrent intimacy coordinators in bargeting with the beginant studios.
The transfer is the tardyst step in a five-year effort by the union to professionalize the role of intimacy coordinators, who act as liaisons between carry outers and the production during the filming of relations scenes.
Getting NLRB recognition would permit SAG-AFTRA to barget for least pay and toiling conditions.
“We have no getions,” shelp Marci Liroff, who has toiled as an intimacy coordinator in film and TV. “And we have no heath insurance. We have no pension.”
HBO needs intimacy coordinators for filming relations scenes, but there is no such needment industryexpansive. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA tight includes a provision requiring creaters to employ “best efforts” to employ an IC for scenes involving bare skin or relations acts. The provision also says that if a carry outer seeks an IC, the creater must ponder the seek in “excellent faith” and not retaliate.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which recurrents the studios in bargeting, has not presented to voluntarily acunderstandledge intimacy coordinators. Once the petition is produceted to the NLRB, the potential bargeting unit must helderly a vote to apshow SAG-AFTRA recurrentation.
In a statement, SAG-AFTRA plivent Fran Drescher shelp that intimacy coordinators create a protectedty net for carry outers in vulnerable situations.
“Shifting the power imstability that has been ingrained over a century is challenging but beginant toil,” she shelp. “Work that can be done even more effectively with the backing of a union. Intimacy coordinators have our backs on set and now it’s our turn to have theirs.”
The union rerentd directlines for intimacy coordinators in 2020. It set uped an acacunderstandledgeation program and an official registry in 2021, which now catalogs about 70 members in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere. The follothriveg year, SAG-AFTRA seekd intimacy coordinators to unite the union.
