Production assistants and assistants on Netflix‘s The Four Seasons are looking to unionize.
The group is filing for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board with the goal of joining a union aligned with LiUNA Local 724, the Hollywood laborers’ group. Production Assistants United, a grassroots organizing movement, is helping organize the group and received a supermajority of signed union authorization cards from crew members on the show in October.
The Four Seasons production assistants are looking for higher pay, union healthcare, and safety standards. While the show, created by Tina Fey, airs on Netflix, Universal Television produces Four Seasons.
“Our colleagues are union members because workers unionized their positions decades ago. Now, we’re organizing to secure the same protections and to build collective power in a political system that prioritizes corporate interests over the working class,” said Caroline O’Riordan, an assistant on the show.
“I’ve been working on productions for going on 10 years now. I’ve been a part of good productions and bad productions, worked with amazing people on projects that never saw the light of day and blockbusters alike, and still, my work is only as valued as whatever the state minimum wage is set to and not the worth of my contribution. My hours are long, sometimes longer than those in my department and we’re expected to do more in a tighter timeframe for the same wages, no healthcare, no per diem, no toll or mileage reimbursement, no lodging stipends,” said production assistant Jasmine Vargas.
This is the latest organizing move from Production Assistants United, which has organized six productions in three months, including The Pitt and Abbott Elementary. The Pitt voted to unionize in September, becoming the first major TV production where production assistants and assistants had done so.
With the reopening of the federal government, Production Assistants United plans on refiling with the NLRB for union elections across several shows and eyeing an upcoming filing for a Universal show.
“When we launched in 2023, some people called a PA union impossible.” said New York PAU Organizer Aelyjah Bell, “As a longtime worker in the film industry, an active NAACP board member, and a person raised by activists and UFT union delegates, I knew that organizing production assistants was both ethically compulsory and inevitable. It is time for the studios to accept this reality.”
