In Hollywood, industry experience roster occupies a specialized but crucial role. The list, run by a nonprofit organization established under collective bargaining agreements between employers and unions in the industry since 1965, tracks specific types of freelance crew members on the West Coast — from makeup artists to plumbers — with experience in their roles. It’s a valuable resource for productions that recruit large numbers of crew members, and employers generally agree in their union contracts to hire roster creators before taking advantage of those who aren’t.
But in an era when Hollywood companies are making fewer films in the United States and shipping projects overseas, it’s becoming harder for some crew members to stay on the roster. In recent weeks, a Contract Services Officer informed a few thousand members of the IATSE crew union that they had been flagged for removal from the list, Hollywood ReporterReports revealed.
This is because these individuals are believed to have not met the minimum eligibility threshold for the list, which is typically having worked one day on a union project within a three-year period, in this case between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2026. On the list, they have not yet been notified of the status of their list, although it is expected that their list will also be subject to review. All those who have been notified that they have been marked for removal can protest this decision, a dispute resolution process that will likely take place over the next few months.
It’s the first time Contract Services has removed crew members from the roster since 2022, before writer and cast strikes put several crew members out of work. The nonprofit typically conducts these removals annually, but in recent years employers and unions have agreed to pause them in a difficult post-strike environment for workers, an industry source says. Since 2022, employment has slowly rebounded, but not as much as many in the industry had hoped: According to IATSE, members worked about 78.9 million hours in 2025, which represents a roughly 36 percent decline from 2022, when the union logged about 122.9 million hours.
At the same time, opportunities for domestic work have also narrowed. Live-scripted productions starting in the U.S. with a budget of $40 million or more fell 37 percent between 2021 and 2025, according to ProdPro.
This situation makes list culling an emotional topic for those whose list status has been called into question. “In my opinion, removing these people from the list actually diminishes their ability to find and accept union jobs,” said Michael Wheelock, the technical director who received the contract services letter a few weeks ago. “And it’s not because they’re not working and haven’t been working for three years, it’s because it’s much harder to find jobs. So, by taking these people out, it takes away their ability to make a living.”
At least a few IATSE locals help their members push back, filing objections on their behalf with contract services. For example, the arts administrators union, IATSE Local 800, told members in an email obtained by THR They filed a “comprehensive protest” on behalf of those affected. But ultimate eligibility for the list is determined by the contract terms that both unions and employers, member companies of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, agree to in their employment contracts. In other words, unions can only push back so much when they have previously agreed to those same rules.
However, in a statement on the issue, Mike Miller, vice president international and director of film and television production at IATSE, condemned “this purge of the workforce” and placed the blame on tax incentives offered by other countries that persuade studios and streaming companies to produce more projects abroad. “Because of these location decisions, employers are now exploiting labor shortages to purge their rosters of qualified workers, thus eliminating the need to provide safety, skill, and anti-harassment training to a workforce that has created profitable content for decades.” (Contract Services runs various training courses for industry professionals.)
He linked the industry experience roster removals to the union’s efforts to secure a federal tax incentive for films to attract more work to the United States. “Every day our federal government fails to act, entertainment industry workers are being purged,” Miller added.
The union will then have the opportunity to renegotiate that eligibility threshold when it returns to the negotiating table with the studios and streamers in 2027.
Workers who spoke to THR About being marked for delisting He described the difficulty of working in the wake of actors’ and writers’ strikes in 2023. The work they found did not have a union contract.
For example, Wheelock became a producer and launched his own company with friends, trying to create his own opportunities. Another source, an assistant editor based in Los Angeles, has worked on smaller freelance projects. Editor Efrain Bardella, who received a contract services letter and has worked in reality television for most of his career, has worked on non-union reality dating shows. They are still working in the entertainment industry and are protesting their delisting.
“It certainly looks like people who continue to work on union matters continue to get union jobs,” said the editorial assistant in the post. “and [for] There’s a lot of people who are probably on the fringes, I think like me, where I certainly know people in the industry but I’m not on a staff of the same people going from job to job, and it’s been difficult for us to find union jobs.
These workers can still re-qualify for the industrial experience list, the contract services letters said. They’ll just have to reapply and accomplish what they did to get on the list in the first place, which depends on the rating, but for many it means working 30 days on eligible products in a one-year period. However, this represents a cap on the one day every three years that allowed them to remain on the list once they qualified.
Some crew members worry that securing union employment will be more difficult if they are not on the roster. “The biggest concern is that when the opportunity arises for a union job, it happens,” the assistant editor said [roster] Status compared to someone else qualified for the same job will be a deciding factor in hiring.
For those who have been struggling to get unionized work in Hollywood after the strikes, “it’s just one more thing to worry about,” Bardella said. He added: “I still have my strike sign in my closet and I feel like it contains some kind of bad magic in some way. It’s like I carry these relics, but they’re still relevant now.”
