Production Assistants Launch Ambitious Bid for Unionization With LiUNA

A veteran Hollywood union is backing an ambitious push to unionize film and television production assistants, a move that has the potential to reshape how many entry-level creatives break into the industry.

The Hollywood branch of Laborers’ International Union of North America (LiUNA), Local 724, is partnering with the grassroots group Production Assistants United to organize one of the last non-union crew positions on entertainment sets, Local 724 business manager Alex Aguilar Jr. announced on Monday. The goal is to bring roles where, classically, early-career creatives — set production assistants, office production assistants, art production assistants, assistants and production secretaries — pay their dues into the union fold across the country.

With around 1,800 active and retired members, LiUNA currently represents utility workers in film and television — including electricians, plumbers, carpenters and sheet metal workers — a range of roles at Universal Studios Hollywood and billboard workers with Outfront Media. The production assistants push represents a bold play from the Local, one that could potentially augment its membership by thousands.

“They’re a lot like us,” Aguilar told The Hollywood Reporter at a union coalition-organized Labor Day parade in the Wilmington neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he announced the partnership. “At LiUNA, we do a lot of the stuff that no one wants to do. And that’s what they do — a lot of the work that folks just frankly don’t want to do.”

Though their tasks can vary widely, production assistants are known for doing unglamorous but necessary work on film and television sets, like guarding locations, fetching food and drinks and quieting the set. Filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Barry Jenkins and Bill Hader all worked, early in their careers, as production assistants.

For Production Assistants United, the LiUNA partnership brings funding and educational resources to an organizing effort that began just a year ago. It was in part the result of a surge in Hollywood labor actions at that moment: Some of the production assistant group’s founding members met on picket lines during the actors’ and writers’ strikes.

But production assistants also recognized that they had a window of opportunity. Some of the founding members were mutual friends with television commercial production workers that had successfully partnered with IATSE to unionize that summer. During that drive, IATSE had managed to secure the inclusion of television commercial production assistants in its new Local. Suddenly, the door was cracked open a little wider 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 Production Assistants United founding member Ethan Ravens. (The Animation Guild has also been making inroads in this space by aggressively organizing hundreds of production workers in the past two years.)

Over the past year, organizers with Production Assistants United phone-banked, organized Zoom town halls, held events in cities across the country and communicated over Discord and Instagram to spread the word about their effort. LiUNA approached members of the group at a crew solidarity event in March.  “As they started to amplify their presence in Hollywood specifically during the strikes, I started to take notice,” says Aguilar. “I saw it as an opportunity not only to grow our Local, but for them to gain more recognition, more respect.”

With the backing of LiUNA, the group next plans to compile a list of active production assistants across the country and gauge enthusiasm for the drive. Their aim is to change basic conditions for production assistants: to raise wages (these workers are traditionally paid minimum wage, per group organizers), institute union-provided health insurance, establish turnaround times 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 and long-term vision that 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 filmmaker in another respect, have all the resources they need to do that and don’t have to be basically a rich, white man and able-bodied.” In other words, “We want to change this industry from the bottom up,” they say.

The group acknowledges that they’re ramping up their organizing at a time when major Hollywood firms are cutting costs and production work in L.A., at least, still hasn’t fully rebounded. But they’re confident that they will eventually succeed in bringing a union to production assistants, even as they and their colleagues have been affected by the ongoing contraction. “It’s a new chapter in our organizing effort with the strength of LiUNA. We are so confident that we are going to get our union,” says Ravens.

Adds Byrne-Gudding, “People may not realize it yet, but we are going to win and we are going to radically change this industry.”