[Los Feliz Slim]

When an actor does a commercial under the Screen Actors Guild collective bargaining agreement, they're due certain payments based on how the commercial is used. There's no monitoring system or third-party entity that controls these payments, basically the advertiser/advertising agency tells their payment company "Hey, we used this commercial" and the payment company sends a check to the actor.

As you might imagine, this system is rife with abuse/sloppiness. Unless the use is high-profile or somebody in the actors family happens to see it or something, most of the time the actor won't even know that the commercial was used. For instance, the actor is due a certain amount of money if the commercial is used in Poland. Unless the actor is Polish, how would they ever know that the use occurred?

Depending on the situation, the penalties for not paying for use are generally light. Under some circumstances there's an arbitration system that sucks ass, takes a year, and still imposes light penalties.

So, I can tell you that in a system where we're dealing with for-profit corporations that are used to cutting corners and bending the rules to get what they want, the system totally doesn't work. It also encourages/allows the presence of total idiocy - why have intelligent people in the positions responsible for making these payments when it really doesn't matter anyway?

I think the companies that at least always try to make the correct payments and to make amends when they don't are just generally fair, honest folk. Also, like in your public transportation example, getting caught cheating once or twice isn't a big deal, but I bet if you got busted 10 times they'd try and bar you from the system or something. Similarly, if it could be demonstrated that Anheuser-Busch, for instance, had a policy of not following the SAG contract, at some point they'd be excluded from it. Or so you'd think!

As an actors' representative, the only recourse I really have when they ignore the contract is to wait for the situations where I've absolutely got somebody dead-to-rights and make their life really, really, unpleasant so that they'll overpay to make me go away, and hopefully think twice about ignoring the contract next time.