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In Hollywood, the Industry Experience Roster occupies a niche but crucial role. The list, administered by a nonprofit founded under collective bargaining agreements between the industry's employers and unions since 1965, keeps track of certain types of freelance crew members on the West Coast - from grips to make-up artists to plumbers - with experience in their roles. It's a valuable resource for productions enlisting large volumes of crew members and, generally speaking, employers agree in their union contracts to hire creatives on the roster before they tap those that aren't.
But in an era when Hollywood companies are producing fewer titles in the U.S. and shipping projects abroad, it's getting difficult for some crew members to stay on the list. In recent weeks, administrator Contract Services has informed a few thousand members of the IATSE crew union that they have been flagged for removal from the roster, The Hollywood Reporter's reporting has revealed.
That's because these individuals are believed not to have met the list's eligibility threshold, which generally is having worked one day on a union project in a three-year period, in this case between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2026. Teamsters Local 399, LiUNA Local 724 and United Association of Plumbers Local 78 members, who in addition to IATSE members make up the roughly 47,000 members currently listed on the roster, have yet to be notified of their list status, though it's expected theirs will also undergo review. All who have been informed that they have been flagged for removal can protest the determination, a dispute resolution process that will likely take place over the next few months.
It's the first time that Contract Services is removing crew members from the list since 2022, before the writers' and actors' strikes put many crew members out of work. Typically, the nonprofit conducts these removals annually, but in recent years employers and unions have agreed to pause them in a tough post-strikes environment for workers, says an industry source. Since 2022, employment has rebounded slowly, but not as much as many industry workers would have hoped: According to IATSE, members worked around 78.9 million hours in 2025, which is down nearly 36 percent from 2022, when the union recorded about 122.9 million hours.
Meanwhile, domestic work opportunities have also narrowed. Live-action, scripted productions starting in the U.S. with a budget at $40 million or above dipped 37 percent between 2021 and 2025, according to ProdPro.
That situation making the roster culling an emotional topic for those whose list status has been questioned. "In my opinion, removing these people from the roster really does take away their ability to find and accept union jobs," said Michael Wheelock, an art director who received a Contract Services letter a few weeks ago. "And it's not because they're not working and haven't worked in three years, it's because the jobs are that much harder to find. So by taking those people off, it really removes their ability to make a living."
At least a handful of IATSE Locals are helping their members push back, filing objections on their behalf with Contract Services. The Art Directors Guild, IATSE Local 800, for instance, told members in an email obtained by THR that they had filed a "blanket protest" on behalf of those affected. But ultimately eligibility for the list is determined by contract terms that both the unions and employers, member companies of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, agree to in their labor contracts. In other words, unions can only push back so much when they previously agreed to those very rules.
Still, in a statement about the issue, IATSE international vp and motion picture and television production department director Mike Miller condemned "this purging of the workforce" and laid the blame on other countries' tax incentives persuading studios and streamers to produce more projects abroad. "Because of these location decisions, employers are now using the lack of work to purge their rosters of eligible workers, thereby eliminating the need to provide safety, skill, and anti-harassment training to the workforce that has created their profit-generating content for decades," he said. (Contract Services administers various training courses for industry workers.)
And he tied the Industry Experience Roster removals to the union's efforts to secure a federal film tax incentive to lure more work back to the U.S. "Every day that our federal government fails to act, entertainment industry workers are being purged," Miller added.
The union will next get the opportunity to re-negotiate this eligibility threshold when it returns to the bargaining table with studios and streamers in 2027.
Workers who spoke to THR about being flagged for removal from the list described difficulty landing work in the wake of the 2023 actors' and writers' strikes. The work they did find didn't have a union contract.
Wheelock, for instance, became a producer and launched his own company with friends, attempting to make his own opportunities. Another source, an L.A.-based assistant editor, has worked on smaller, indie projects. Editor Efren Pardilla, who received a Contract Services Letter and has worked in reality television for most of his career, worked on non-union reality dating shows. They're still working in entertainment and protesting their removal from the roster.
"It definitely feels like people who have continued to be employed on union things have kept getting union jobs," said the assistant editor in this position. "And [for] a lot of people who are maybe more on the fringes, I guess like myself, where I definitely know people in the industry but I'm not in a set crew of the same people who go job to job, it has been harder for us to find union jobs."
These workers can still requalify for the Industry Experience Roster, the Contract Services letters have stated. They would just have to reapply and accomplish what they did to get on the list in the first place, which depends on the classification, but for many means working 30 days on eligible productions in a one-year period. Still, that's a higher bar than the one day every three years that allowed them to stay on the roster once they had qualified.
Some of these crew members are concerned that union work will be more difficult to secure if they are not on the list. Said the assistant editor, "the biggest concern is that when the opportunity to work on a union job comes up, that [roster] status compared to someone else who's up for the same job would be a deciding factor in hiring."
For those who have already been struggling to land union-covered work in a post-strikes Hollywood, "it's just one more thing to worry about," said Pardilla. He added, "I still have my strike sign in my closet and I feel like it has sort of bad juju in a way. It's like I'm carrying this relic, but it's still relevant now."
