Union & Non-Union Talent Management

Here is how the work lines up. Union talent management in New York operates inside the most layered labour settings in American production. SAG-AFTRA New York Local 1 governs on-camera and voice principals through the Codified Basic Agreement and the Commercials Contract; DGA East covers directors, ADs, and UPMs; WGA East covers screen and broadcast writers; Actors' Equity Association covers Broadway and Off-Broadway crossover talent whose stage commitments must be scheduled around evening curtain calls; and on the crew side IATSE Local 52 anchors below-the-line production with Local 161 script supervisors, Local 798 makeup, and Teamsters Local 817 covering transportation captains. Our team works each agreement against actual call sheets so production budgets reflect the holiday pay, meal-penalty triggers, turnaround rules, and pension-and-health contributions that New York regions enforces more aggressively than most US markets.

During production we run a daily compliance loop against the SAG-AFTRA daily contract minimums, the Equity Production Contract crossover rules, IATSE turnaround windows, and the New York State Department of Labor child actors permitting framework where minors are on set. Time sheets reconcile to Cast & Crew, Entertainment Partners, or Wrapbook payroll with statutory deductions, pension-and-health contributions remitted on schedule, and overtime stacked according to each guild's separate computation.

Documentation includes signed schedules fit for E&O underwriting, qualifying-spend evidence for the New York State Film Tax Credit applied through Empire State Development, and an audit trail ready for completion-bond and broadcaster delivery review. Disputes are routed through New York entertainment counsel before they escalate to formal grievance. The same workflow scales from a single inbound SAG-AFTRA principal in Manhattan to multi-hundred-crew episodic series across Steiner and Silvercup.