2023 proved to a be a landmark year for Hollywood labor as actors and writers called a historic double strike in the name of reshaping a transforming industry. As that battle was waged over issues like AI and compensation in the streaming age, chief negotiators for the striking unions, as well as the directors’ union, took home the top labor leader salaries in Hollywood.
SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland led the pack with a gross salary of $1,016,182, according to the labor group’s latest LM-2 filing, a form of annual financial reports for unions. He was followed by Directors Guild of America national executive director Russell Hollander, with a gross salary of $775,000, and Writers Guild of America West executive director Ellen Stutzman, whose gross wages constituted $682,692. (The figures compiled by The Hollywood Reporter included data from both 2024 and 2023 LM-2s, whichever constituted the latest filings, spanning a period between Jan. 1, 2023-April 30, 2024. These salaries represent the wages of union leaders during the 2023 Hollywood strikes.)
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During this same period, IATSE’s top officer of 16 years, Matthew Loeb, came in fourth with $553,487 in gross salary. The executive director for the Broadway actor and stage manager union Actors’ Equity, Alvin Vincent Jr., took home $437,528 while outgoing Motion Picture Editors Guild national executive director Cathy Repola and former WGA East executive director Lowell Peterson made $374,210 and $349,061, respectively.
Major Teamsters leaders in entertainment, Local 817’s Thomas J. O’Donnell and Local 399’s Lindsay Dougherty, hovered near the bottom of the list. The New York area officer earned $312,325, while the L.A.-based union leader made $272,962. (Dougherty’s figure combines her salary as the principal officer for Local 399 and her earnings as a vp of the international union.)
Some entertainment labor leaders can be among the highest paid union officials in the country. Just 90 employees from national labor unions out of 12,753 earned more than $350,000 in 2023, per LM-2 filings, according to Wayne State University Mike Ilitch School of Business professor emeritus Marick Masters, who studies the spending habits of unions. (This data does not encompass elected officers, who can be paid high salaries, or union Locals. It looks at total compensation, including reimbursements for official business.)
Masters notes that leaders of the Air Line Pilots Association, National Football League Players Association and select entertainment unions were highly paid in 2023. “The airline pilots, the professional athletes, the directors, the screen actors and the writers, they have a lot of highly paid people within their membership,” Masters explains. “The people that are in the upper end make a lot of money and they can afford to pay staff to represent them.”
Entertainment labor leaders’ wages do not seem “wildly disproportionate” in the eyes of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Labor and Employment Relations professor and director of the Labor Education Program Robert Bruno. Key considerations include the mean or median earnings of union members, the size of the union, the contribution workers make to the wealth of their industry and the value of individual contracts, he says. Given that the union leaders work in entertainment, an industry can disburse stratospheric earnings to certain unionized creatives, these numbers “would not be outside the parameters of what you would expect,” he adds.
A related factor to consider is what an industry pays its company CEOs, to situate union leaders in the marketplace, says Bruno. And Hollywood studios and streamers certainly aren’t skimping on salaries. In 2023, as the double strike stretched 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 above $30 million — nearly 30 times Crabtree-Ireland’s latest reported earnings.
