2023 has been a landmark year for Hollywood workers, with actors and writers calling a historic double strike in the name of restructuring a transformative industry. As the battle rages over issues like AI and pay in the streaming era, the strikers’ unions and the directors’ guild’s lead negotiators have become the highest-paid labor leaders in Hollywood.
According to the union’s most recent LM-2 filings, a type of annual financial report for labor unions, SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland had the highest total salary at $1,016,182, followed by Directors Guild of America national executive director Russell Hollander with a total salary of $775,000 and Writers Guild of America West executive director Ellen Stutzman with a total salary of $682,692. (The figures compiled by The Hollywood Reporter include data from both the 2024 and 2023 LM-2 filings, the most recent of which covers the period Jan. 1, 2023, to April 30, 2024. These salaries represent the wages of union leaders during the 2023 Hollywood strike.)
During that same period, Matthew Loeb, who served as IATSE’s chief executive for 16 years, came in fourth with a total salary of $553,487. Alvin Vincent Jr., executive director of Broadway actors’ and stage managers’ union Actors’ Equity, made $437,528, while outgoing Cinema Editors Guild national executive director Kathy Lepola and former WGA Eastern executive director Lowell Peterson made $374,210 and $349,061, respectively.
The Teamsters’ key entertainment sector leaders, Thomas J. O’Donnell of Local 817 and Lindsay Dougherty of Local 399, slumped towards the bottom of the list, with the New York-area officer making $312,325 a year and the Los Angeles-based union leader making $272,962. (Dougherty’s figure combines his salary as a key officer in Local 399 with his income as vice president of the international union.)
Some entertainment industry union leaders are among the highest-paid union officials in the country. Of the 12,753 employees in the national union, only 90 will earn more than $350,000 in 2023, according to LM-2 filings, according to Malick Masters, a professor emeritus at Wayne State University’s Mike Ilitch College of Business who studies union spending habits. (This data doesn’t include elected officials or local union chapters, who can be highly paid; it covers total compensation, including reimbursements for official duties.)
Masters points out that leaders of the Air Line Pilots Association, the National Football League Players Association and some entertainment unions are among the highly paid in 2023. “They have a lot of highly paid members: airline pilots, professional athletes, directors, movie actors, screenwriters,” Masters explains. “The people at the top are making a lot of money and can afford to pay the staff that represents them.”
In the eyes of Robert Bruno, professor of labor and employment relations and director of labor education programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the pay of union leaders in the entertainment industry is not “grossly disproportionate.” Important considerations include the average or median income of union members, the size of the union, the contribution workers make to the industry’s wealth, and the value of their individual contracts, Bruno said. Because union leaders work in the entertainment industry, an industry that can distribute astronomical incomes to certain creators who are union members, these figures “would not be outside the realm of expectation,” he added.
A related factor to consider, Bruno says, is how much the industry pays company CEOs to position union leaders in the market. Hollywood studios and streamers certainly aren’t skimping on pay. In 2023, as the double strike dragged on for months, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and former Paramount president and CEO Bob Bakish all made more than $30 million, nearly 30 times Crabtree Ireland’s most recently reported profits.