On TV, John Connolly has made special appearances on 'The West Wing,' portraying Matt Kelly, a working man dealing with a mortgage, the cost of sending his daughter to college and other economic pressures facing working families.

In real life, John Connolly advocates for people like Matt Kelly as president of AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. It's an unpaid position that he assumed last year on top of his regular acting job. 'We do it because we believe in it,' he said of the elected leadership of the 80,000-member union.

Connolly has been a professional actor for 31 years and joined AFTRA while performing at the Actors Theatre in St. Paul. He was back in the Twin Cities recently as part of a national tour to meet with AFTRA locals around the country.

While the union's largest membership is among actors, announcers, singers and broadcasters on the East and West Coasts, it has thousands of members in cities such as Minneapolis and St. Paul. The union's jurisdiction is broad, covering news and broadcasting, entertainment programming, the recording business, commercials and non-broadcast industrial and educational media.

Growing industry
AFTRA members are employed in rapidly growing industries and in businesses that are increasingly important to the American economy. While the media and entertainment industries are among the mostly densely unionized in the United States, media unions historically have not played a big role in the U.S. labor movement. That's changing, however, Connolly said.

'We (media/entertainment unions) have something unique to bring to the table,' he said. 'We've stepped up to try to play a role in the AFL-CIO.'

Among the expertise that AFTRA brings to the labor movement is experience in organizing immigrant workers and knowledge about the media and entertainment industries.

The union currently is engaged in a pilot program in southern California to organize Spanish-language entertainment and media. The top five radio stations in Los Angeles, for example, are Spanish-language stations. The most highly rated TV newscast is in Spanish, Connolly said.

Organizing immigrants and non-English speakers is 'a core challenge to the labor movement and a core challenge to us,' he said.

So far, actors employed on two 'telenovelas,' a type of Spanish-language soap opera, have joined AFTRA, as have workers appearing on the Spanish-language version of 'The Young and the Restless,' Connolly said.

The union plans to expand the organizing program to Miami, New York and Chicago.

Consolidation poses threat
AFTRA's intimate knowledge of the media and entertainment industry has become even more valuable to the labor movement as the Federal Communications Commission considers deregulation of television and radio broadcasters. Changes could lead to even greater consolidation of ownership among a handful of very powerful corporations.

'We (AFTRA) have a responsibility not just to our members but to society to lead the discussion on what constitutes the best use of the people's airwaves,' Connolly said. 'We think the trends in ownership deregulation are a potential disaster. We stand a danger of people really losing control of a precious resource. It's no less important than Arctic oil drilling.'

The FCC currently is accepting public comment on a plan that would, among other things, overturn the prohibition on a single corporation from owning major newspapers and major TV and radio stations in a community and thus dominating that local market.

Media consolidation has enormous implications for content, Connolly said. It also affects the workers employed in news and entertainment. Whether they are singers or actors or news reporters, AFTRA members are increasingly finding themselves working for the same employers, Connolly said. For example, WCCO-TV in the Twin Cities is owned by CBS, which is owned by Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures. Across the industry, corporations are attacking workers' wages, benefits and working conditions.

Workers must respond to this corporate concentration with a new sense of solidarity and 'rediscover the basic lessons of organizing and mobilizing and inspiring people to stand up to get what's right,' Connolly said.

For more information

Visit the AFTRA website, www.aftra.org