Welcome to another summer of uncertainty in Hollywood as more crew union contract negotiations get underway

Hollywood’s Teamsters Local 399 union members have the essential job of transporting materials that make up the building blocks of a movie and TV set.

The members of Hollywood’s crew member unions include people who – literally – help keep the lights on around town on film and television show sets, the same ones that will go dark again if the unions’ contract negotiations fail and another strike descends upon an industry still sore from last summer’s historic strikes. “There’s always a reason to strike,” Lindsay Dougherty, Teamsters Local 399 principal officer and chairperson of the Hollywood Basic Crafts, said in a recent interview with CNN ahead of Monday’s start of the unions’ negotiations with major studios. But, she adds “I don’t anticipate that the studios will be giving us that reason.” Either way, she continued, the union intends to “fight for everything that we can get” because “we’re done being disrespected.” While entertainment consumers would never know it from their still-plentiful streaming carousels, industry professionals across the many trades that are essential to the DNA of a Hollywood movie and TV sets say their industry is on crutches. The studios and streamers are buying and producing fewer projects. A lot of projects are being filmed out of California and out of the country, resulting in fewer job opportunities for those living in the heart of the entertainment industry. “Some of these proposals we have made for 50 plus years so this fight was always going to happen, but now the fight is different because our members have suffered such financial hardship in the last year from not working – and at the hands of the studios,” Dougherty said. “The studios are the ones that, in my opinion, could have deterred that from happening or prevented a dual strike from happening.”