.png)
1 month ago
11 ARTICLE AD
SAG-AFTRA‘s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland was the highest paid among the Hollywood union leaders and the ninth highest-paid labor official in the country last year.
The National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator, who helped lead the actors union through a historic 118-day strike last year, earned a salary of $1.02M in 2023, according to filings with the U.S. Department of Labor.
That marks a 6.5% increase versus the year prior, when his salary was just shy of the $1M mark at $954,357, and it’s a hefty raise from the roughly $700,000 that his predecessor David White made in his final year at the helm of the union.
SAG-AFTRA reported $116,412,527 in dues and agency fees last year, marking about a $10M decrease from the year prior, likely due to the strike. It paid its employees a total of $58,985,778 — a nearly $9M increase from 2022.
Crabtree-Ireland’s salary still pales in comparison to the more than 8M earned last year by the NFL Players’ Association’s DeMaurice Smith, who was the highest-earning of the country’s union officials. In fact, a majority of the top paid union officials work for the sports unions.
It’s also not too far off from the earnings of Writers Guild of America West’s former executive director, David Young, who earned more than $860,000 last year despite taking a leave of absence just before the contract negotiations that eventually led to a 148-day strike. That was a modest increase from the more than $830,000 he took home the year prior.
Young was replaced by Ellen Stutzman, who earned nearly $683,000, roughly doubling her assistant executive director’s salary from 2022. WGA East leader Lowell Peterson, who stepped down last year after 15 years, earned just shy of $400,000.
Russell Hollander, the executive director of the Directors Guild of America, had a salary of $775,000 — up from $725,000 the year prior.
The below-the-line unions do not pay sums quite so high, with IATSE leader Matthew Loeb making $550,000 last year. Lindsay Dougherty, the leader of the Teamsters Motion Picture Division and secretary-treasurer of Local 399, earned just $240,000.
The Hollywood union leaders are all among the highest-paid in the country, as most labor officials in other sectors make much more modest sums. Sean O’Brien, the general president of the Teamsters, received a salary of around $250,000 last year.
Even the highest of these union salaries is pennies compared to the wages earned by the CEOs of the major Hollywood studios and media companies, though they are a stark contrast to the earnings of many of their members.
According to data from SAG-AFTRA, more than 80% of the guild’s 160,000 members earn less than $26,000, the minimum required for health insurance eligibility, from acting each year.
