To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
October 28, 2021
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers’ Voice
IATSE rank-and-file workers are angry about overwork embodied in bureaucrats' unsafe tentative agreement.
Shortly before Alec Baldwin, a producer and actor in the film Rust, inadvertently shot the cinematographer to death, union production workers had walked off the set in protest against violations of gun safety and other issues. A producer had even called the police to get the union workers off the set faster. Six hours later Baldwin was handed a prop gun with a live cartridge by a nonunion worker, told it was a “cold gun” (safe, not containing a bullet), and he mistakenly shot Halyna Hutchins.
The shooting was therefore an indirect result of the working conditions being protested by the union's rank and file as they wait to vote on the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) leadership's tentative agreement.
The set had numerous serious safety violations and had had at least one severe gun event recently. A few days earlier a prop gun had fired while in Baldwin's stunt double's hands, simply by being handled, the trigger never pulled. A crew member said,
“there were no safety meetings. There was no assurance that it
wouldn’t happen again. All they wanted to do was rush, rush, rush.”
Union crew members described the conditions on the Rust set:
“One crew member purportedly addressed the walkout in a private Facebook post. 'We cited everything from lack of payment for three weeks, taking our hotels away despite asking for them in our deals, lack of COVID safety, and on top of that, poor gun safety! Poor on-set safety period!' the person wrote, per Deadline. 'They brought in four non-union guys to replace us and tried calling the cops on us.’'' (1)
"'Corners were being cut', a source tells the Los Angeles Times.
“Members of the low-budget film said they had been promised the production would pay for their hotel rooms in Santa Fe. But after filming began, the crews were told they instead would be required to make the 50-mile drive from Albuquerque each day, rather than stay overnight in nearby Santa Fe. That rankled crew members who worried that they might have an accident after spending 12 to 13 hours on the set.” (2)
Thus the culpability for the shooting is shared by the “armorer” who handed Baldwin the “hot gun” and the administration of the crew, including Baldwin, for maintaining an unsafe set. The protocols the violated are followed throughout the entire film industry, though how much this is true is an open question.
Conditions such as these have provoked anger among IATSE rank-and-file workers. The union bureaucrats recently brought back a tentative agreement with management, but online worker protest burst out. In online forums huge numbers of rank-and-filers excoriated the leadership for failing to bring them protection against extremely long hours with their resulting exhaustion and safety dangers. The leadership then delayed the vote for several weeks, hoping to quell the rebellion.
The clock is ticking. Like food production workers, film workers are protesting the extreme workloads the capitalists place on the workers in their drive for profits This time the profits are bloodstained.
1) Taryn Rider, Yahoo Entertainment, Oct. 22, 2021,
2) LA Times, Oct. 22, 2021. <>
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