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December 29, 2015 | 05:14PM PT
Leaders of the Writers Guild of America West are asking the 8,000 members to approve holding elections in two of every three years rather than the current practice of annual elections.
Members are receiving three proposed amendments to the their constitution. Ballots on the proposals, which have been approved by the WGA West board, will be counted on May 3.
The first amendment would change the WGA West’s annual election to a contest held on a cycle of two of every three years starting in 2021; lengthen the current terms for officers and board members to three years from the current two years; allow officers to remain in office for six years, rather than the current four years; and allow board members to remain in office for nine years rather than the current eight years.
The second amendment will reduce the number of board candidates that the WGA West’s nominating committee must nominate each election from the current 16 to as few as 12 for the eight open board seats. The board told members in the notice sent to them that the amendment is designed to deal with the difficulty experienced by recent nominating committees in recruiting enough nominees to run.
The third amendment reduces the number of signatures required to run by petition for an officer position to 25 from the current 50 and to 15 signatures from the current 25 to run for the board.
WGA West President Howard Rodman said in the notice that the changes are aimed at making the election process “more compatible with the actual work of union governance.”
The changes do not impact the WGA East, which has 4,000 members and is based in New York. The WGA West and WGA East jointly negotiate their master contract with producers, a three-year deal which will expire on May 1, 2017.
The two most recent WGA negotiations have been relatively low-key compared with the bitter 2007-08 strike, which lasted 100 days.
The father of Sarah Jones, the camera assistant who was killed last year on the “Midnight Rider” set, has opposed a reduced jail term for director Randall Miller.
In letters sent Monday to Wayne County Superior Court Judge Anthony L. Harrison and Sheriff John Carter, Richard Jones asked that Miller serve the full two-year sentence. The term was imposed after Miller pleaded guilty to felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass in the Feb. 20, 2014, train accident that killed Sarah Jones and injured eight others.
The letter was filed three weeks after Miller’s lawyer had sought leniency for Miller. Attorney Ed Garland had cited Miller’s model behavior as well as deteriorating health in seeking a reduction of his time in custody.
“I truly seek healing for all involved,” Jones said. “There is, however, a need for accountability. It is, after all, apparent that Mr. Miller and his co-defendants displayed gross negligence and a reckless disregard for the safety of their cast and crew.”
Jones noted that Miller had “willingly” entered into the agreement for two years in jail and eight years of probation.
“Beyond Mr. Miller and his co-defendants, there is a need to maintain a strong message to the film industry that those in charge of their cast and crew will be held responsible for their safety … that such recklessness for safety will not be tolerated,” Jones wrote.
“The motion states that Mr. Miller’s family and friends miss him. I can understand and relate to this. But there is a difference. Mr. Miller will return home. Sarah never will.”
Jones also said the letters supporting Garland’s motion are “riddled with untruths and misconception,” noting that one is from Miller’s father-in-law and the other is from Miller’s retired neighbor. He also disputed Garland’s assertion that the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department has a policy whereby inmates can earn “two-for-one credit” for good behavior.
“It was with the understanding that Mr. Miller would serve the full two years in jail for which Elizabeth (Sarah’s mother) and I agreed to accept the plea terms,” he said.
Jones also included an excerpt from an open letter sent to Miller from injured crew member Izabeau Giannakopoulos, who helped pull Miller off the train track: “You are not wrong in feeling that you are not the only person to have made a mistake. It does not mean that you should be exempt or relieved of your penalty. We all have had to accept the circumstances of the aftermath. Each person has had their own, and this is yours.”
Garland noted in the Dec. 7 motion that the 53-year-old director had gained 39 pounds over several weeks and that a nurse had recently found that his blood pressure was elevated. Garland also said Miller had complained of shortness of breath and a persistent cough.
Camera assistant Jones was killed when the production of “Midnight Rider” was shooting on a train trestle near Jesup, Ga., and a train came, forcing cast and crew that didn’t anticipate it to scramble for safety. The production company did not secure a permit from the owner of the tracks, CSX Transportation Corp. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued nearly $75,000 in safety fines.
An appeals panel upheld the sanctions after they were challenged by Film Allman, the company that Miller and his wife, Jody Savin, set up to make the independent feature.
News that Jones had opposed early release was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.
December 24, 2015 12:55pm
The SAG Pension & Health Plans are expected to be served Monday with a wrongful-termination lawsuit accusing the benefit plans of firing an older female employee who was undergoing treatment for breast cancer and, to save money, replacing her with a younger, male foreign worker. The suit, which also names SAG-AFTRA as a defendant, claims that the Plans discriminated against her by operating as a “body shop” for IT workers who are brought there from India to work illegally on temporary visas.
If true, it’s yet another black eye for the $3 billion benefits Plans, which have been stung by a string of embarrassing scandals and controversies recently.
The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in October (read it here), but the defendants have yet to be served. It alleges that Yelena Kutepova was fired from her job in the IT department in July to make room for a worker from India. And once again, Nader Karimi, the plans’ disgraced and now-convicted former Chief Information Officer, allegedly is involved.
In her suit, which also alleges age discrimination and discrimination based on national origin, Kutepova says she has “documents and witnesses” who will attest that the Plans operate as a “body shop” that brings in foreign workers “exclusively from one specific national origin under fraudulently filed work visas to intentionally exclude U.S. workers from the employment market.” According to the suit, the Plans “engaged in the abuse of the work visa program by hiring foreign workers on H1-B work visas. The majority of H1-B workers hired by (the Plans) and working onsite at its Los Angeles offices are of Indian national origin.”Her attorney, James Otto, has made similar allegations against other industry employers. He’s also claimed that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she authorized the American embassy in India to accept and process visa applications in excess of “established limits.” Otto said he sent a process server to serve the lawsuit Thursday, but the offices of SAG-AFTRA and the SAG P&H Plans were closed for Christmas Eve. He said he’ll serve them on Monday.
Kutepova, who had worked in the IT department at the Plans since 1998, said she was fired by her supervisor on July 17 “on the grounds that she was missing too much time off work because her cancer medical treatments were scheduled at her lunch hour and would occasionally cause her to be late after lunch by 5 to 10 minutes.”
The suit alleges that on that same day, the Plans told her in writing that she was being terminated “to reduce the number of employees in the IT department.” She claims, however, that other “American workers” — who, like she, had been downsized — were all over age 50 and “not of Indian national origin” and that they were replaced by “males, under the age of 40, all of whom were of Indian national origin.”
Kutepova claims that her supervisor had schemed with his boss, Karimi, to get rid of her for years, creating a hostile work environment in an attempt to make her quit. Her supervisor had been Karimi’s protégé, had come with him to the Plans from Fox and succeeded Karimi as head of the IT department after he was fired for allegedly embezzling from the Plans.
A month after the suit was filed, Karimi pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return in which he failed to report income of more than $700,000 he received from contractors to upgrade the Plans’ computer system. Karimi was fired from the Plans in 2009 for allegedly taking kickbacks from outside tech vendors to whom he’d awarded lucrative contracts. According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, “Karimi entered into agreements with vendors that agreed to pay a portion of the money they received from Plans to a company affiliated with Karimi, Enterprise Technology and Management Services. The payments to ETMS totaled $711,000, and Karimi used the sums for personal expenses while not declaring them as income on his tax returns.”
The alleged embezzlement scheme brought down the Plans’ longtime CEO, Bruce Dow, who resigned in 2012 after Craig Simmons, the Plans’ former Executive Director of Human Resources, accused him of covering up Karimi’s alleged embezzlement, a charge Dow vehemently denied. That case was settled in confidential arbitration in the fall 2014.
When Simmons was fired, he sued the Plans, and during his deposition, Dow told how he came to discover Karimi’s actions, which took place in spring 2009. Dow said it had been difficult to determine exactly how much Karimi allegedly had embezzled but testified it could have been as much as $3 million.
“Before Nader Karimi was appointed as Chief Information Officer, (the Plans’) IT department was a diverse workplace, comprised of workers from many national origins and who were either United States citizens or green card holders,” she states in the suit, claiming that today it is “no longer diverse, consisting mainly of employees of Indian descent.”
The U.S. Department of Labor keeps a list of “willful violators” of the H-IB visa program, and the SAG Pension and Health Plans is not on it.