When American workers are forced to compete with slaves or vastly unsafe workplaces, something was going to break.

Everyone in this thread is reading surface level media summaries.

This is 1000% pro-union.

IATSE workers have been decimated by the move of productions to Serbia since 2023.

LA and Atlanta film productions have all but collapsed since the offshoring of production. Serbian crews work without unions for much cheaper than local IATSE members.

This is designed to save IATSE and domestic American production.

Since when does the MAGA crowd give a hoot about unions?

The studios are dying. I go to the movies every week when there are movies. Other than Minecraft, the biggest crowd I’ve seen was the Star Wars re-release.

Since the Dems charged towards globalization. The former union workers are being devastated by it and think protectionism will help them. It possibly will help them, just not America as a whole.

Thats the general line of reasoning. Rs are walking a line with union courting since a chunk of their base is anti union, just as dems were walking a line with globalization.

This is my current understanding of the undercurrents.

Is it pro union, or does it happen to just match union's interests today? I've not seen him mention unions explicitly, neither in search nor perplexity. He did mention Hollywood finance, but whether he ment helping the workers or helping some studio owner by that is not clear to me. With the current track record of what's dismantled, I'm not sure he cares about IATSE at all. His explanation of the reasons mentions lots of other things though.

Teamsters statement:

https://teamster.org/2025/05/teamsters-statement-on-presiden...

IATSE statement:

https://iatse.net/iatse-on-president-trump-movie-tariff-anno...

tl;dr - the Teamsters love this. IATSE likes it, but wants to make sure their Canadian membership isn't hurt.

The cynic in me wonders what will happen once the first billionaire whines to Trump how the unions make returning movies to the US so expensive.

I was asking about the other direction. Sure it's convenient for IATSE right now, but is Trump thinking about them at all or are they going to be thrown under the bus with the next change/decision?

I'm a similarly aged European who studied, worked, lived in the States for a decade and moved out for good ten years ago, abandoned my Green Card and never looked back. The world is a big beautiful place. Much bigger and more important and diverse than the US. More free nowadays too.