A veteran Hollywood union is backing an ambitious initiative to unionize film and TV production assistants, a move that could redefine how many first-time creatives enter the industry.
The Hollywood chapter of the Laborers' International Union of North America (LiUNA), Local 724, is teaming up with the grassroots group Production Assistants United to organize one of the last non-unionized crew positions on entertainment sets, Local 724 business manager Alex Aguilar Jr. announced Monday. The goal is to bring roles where traditionally early-career creatives — on-set production assistants, office production assistants, art production assistants, production assistants and secretaries — pay their dues into the union across the country.
With approximately 1,800 active and retired members, LiUNA currently represents utility workers in film and television, including electricians, plumbers, carpenters and sheet metal workers, a variety of roles at Universal Studios Hollywood and billboard workers at Outfront Media. The production assistant push represents a bold move by the Local, potentially increasing its membership by thousands.
“They are very similar to us,” Aguilar said. The Hollywood Reporter during a Labor Day parade organized by the union coalition in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he announced the partnership. “At LiUNA, we do a lot of things that nobody wants to do. And that's what they do: a lot of work that people frankly don't want to do.”
Although their duties can vary widely, production assistants are known for performing unglamorous but necessary jobs on film and television sets, such as location scouting, fetching food and drinks, and maintaining silence on set. Directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Barry Jenkins, and Bill Hader all worked as production assistants early in their careers.
For Production Assistants United, the LiUNA partnership brings funding and educational resources to an organizing effort that began just a year ago. It was partly the result of a wave of labor action in Hollywood at the time: Some of the production assistants’ founding members met on picket lines during the actors’ and writers’ strikes.
But production assistants also recognized a window of opportunity. Some of the founding members were mutual friends with TV commercial production workers who had successfully worked with IATSE to unionize that summer. During that campaign, IATSE had managed to secure the inclusion of TV commercial production assistants in its new Local. Suddenly, the door was a little wider open for production assistants in the film and television world. “It was basically a huge thing for us because a lot of people would say organizing production assistants is impossible,” says Ethan Ravens, a founding member of Production Assistants United. (The Animation Guild has also made strides in this space by aggressively organizing hundreds of production workers over the past two years.)
Over the past year, Production Assistants United organizers have been call-banking, holding Zoom town halls, holding events in cities across the country, and communicating via Discord and Instagram to spread the word about their efforts. LiUNA reached out to the group at a crew solidarity event in March. “When they started amplifying their presence in Hollywood, especially during the strikes, I started to take notice,” Aguilar says. “I saw it as an opportunity to not only grow our place, but to get them more recognition, more respect.”
With the support of LiUNA, the group plans to compile a list of active production assistants across the country and gauge enthusiasm for the campaign. Their goal is to change the basic conditions for production assistants: raise wages (these workers are traditionally paid the minimum wage, according to the group's organizers), establish union-provided health insurance, set delivery deadlines, and create grievance procedures.
Organizers also want to create “structured pathways” for production assistants to advance their careers, says founding member Clio Byrne-Gudding. “This is the most ambitious, long-term vision we have for this union,” they say. “We want to make sure that people who want to join this industry, whether it’s to be a PA forever or to become a director in another sense, have all the resources they need to do that and don’t have to be a rich, white, able-bodied guy.” In other words, “We want to change this industry from the bottom up,” they say.
The group acknowledges that they’ve stepped up their organizing at a time when major Hollywood companies are cutting costs and production work in Los Angeles, at least, hasn’t fully recovered. But they’re confident they’ll eventually get production assistants a union, even though they and their colleagues have been hurt by the ongoing downturn. “It’s a new chapter in our organizing effort with the strength of LiUNA. We’re so confident we’re going to get our union,” Ravens says.
Byrne-Gudding adds: “People may not realize it yet, but we are going to win and we are going to fundamentally change this industry.”