AMPTP Hires Pinkerton for Post-Strike Cleanup

As of 12:01 AM Pacific Time on November 9th, 2023, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Actors (SAG-AFTRA) is no longer on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), following a tentative agreement between the SAG-AFTRA Negotiating Committee and the CEOs of the largest film and television studios in the country.

This came about four days after the AMPTP gave the Negotiating Committee what they called their “Last, Best, and Final Offer,” which was rejected, and months after the conclusion of the even longer 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike — which also featured a failed “last, best, and final offer” from AMPTP. At 118 days, this was the longest strike in SAG-AFTRA history, and has involved many underhanded tactics on the part of the AMPTP — but their newest tactic might just take the cake.

The Doily Allergen’s special investigations unit has uncovered internal Slack message revealing that mere hours after the strike’s conclusion, the AMPTP hired Pinkerton, a security and detective agency, for what Disney CEO Bob Iger referred to as an “industry cleanse.” Pinkerton has long been associated with strikebreaking and worker surveillance, dating back to the 1800s and continuing into the modern day, with Amazon and Starbucks having recently been exposed hiring the agency. However, as far as we know, Pinkerton has never been hired to clean up hordes of laborers after a strike’s end.

In reply to Iger’s Slack post, Reed Hastings, co-founder and executive chairman of Netflix, messaged back, “when you say cleanse do you mean baths? I think there are other companies for that,” to which Iger clarified that by “cleanse” he meant “taking all those traitorous union actors out of the picture, by which I mean the living world, by which I mean killing them all.”

We here at The Doily Allergen are still trying to deduce what he meant by this. Hastings, however, simply replied, “ah, alr.” We’ll keep you, the loyal public, informed as we learn more.

Update:

Since the initial writing of this article, AMPTP has gone softly public with their goals. In a Zoom press conference not hidden from view but also not reported on by any of the major news networks in the AMPTP, Michael De Luca, co-CEO of Warner Bros., explained that the AMPTP’s current plan of action is to “ruthlessly send out the Pinkertons into the night to shoot every motherfucker in the head who’s even so much as thought about joining SAG-AFTRA.” He later clarified that the AMPTP’s intention with this plan is to “teach a lesson to every aspiring actor out there.” Intriguing!

During the press conference, Universal chairman Donna Langley expanded her colleague’s points, saying, “As official girlboss of the Minions company, I’ve been making sure that the AMPTP gives equal opportunity to women and men, every step of the way. That’s why I’m so proud to announce that female members of the union will be killed just as painfully and efficiently as male union members.”

When questioned about the status of WGA in relation to these plans, Bob Bakish, president and CEO of Paramount, said that “the original plan was to scare those pesky writers into submission” by demonstrating what the AMPTP could do to the actors. However, he immediately followed this up, asking his fellow executives, “Hey, what if we just got rid of all the writers too, though? It would make this whole thing a lot cleaner, you know, to just make sure we get a whole new generation of submissive workers in both parts, the acting and the writing.” This was followed by a general murmur of agreement from the AMPTP leaders, which we at The Doily Allergen are kind of struggling to interpret. What does it all mean?!

We also contacted James Hapstack McFrump, Secret Ultimate Big Shot Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency (the official directors apparently answer to him before even the President). He appeared to not know anything about the situation, and when asked directly, he replied, “Sorry, Pinker what now? Never heard of that.” (This despite the fact that we had not even mentioned Pinkerton by name.) Our investigators were quickly dispatched from McFrump’s office, some more permanently than others.

All in all, this is a big old mystery to us. We really just can’t tell what the AMPTP is planning to do here, or what Pinkerton’s role is in all this. Surely both groups have the best of intentions with how they’re planning to deal with the ex-strikers, but we genuinely have no clue what those intentions might be. CEOs can be so opaque with their words sometimes, you know?