Duncan Crabtree-Ireland ’98 Leads Actors' Strike

By Carla Meyer

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland ’98 posing outside of UC Davis School of Law.
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland ’98

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland ’98 is not an actor. Yet he is one of the most famous faces from the 2023 Hollywood actors’ strike. 

As national executive director of actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, Crabtree-Ireland led negotiations with studios during the nearly four-month strike that ended in November. The media often called upon Crabtree-Ireland to clarify his union’s stance on thorny issues like compensation from streaming services and the use of artificial intelligence in actors’ performances. 

The New York Times published a profile on Crabtree-Ireland -- a 23-year SAG-AFTRA veteran who started with the union as a staff attorney -- that remarked on his suddenly high profile. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (“The Nanny”) cemented Crabtree-Ireland’s celebrity status at February’s SAG movie and TV awards ceremony when she called him “the hardest-working man in show business” before a crowd that included Oprah Winfrey and Meryl Streep. 

“The spotlight is not something I necessarily sought out,” Crabtree-Ireland told the Counselor in a video interview. “But there is an important role someone in my position has to play in terms of having to deliver a public message about our goals, the details and policies we are trying to pursue, and also, institutionally, to speak on behalf of the union and its members.” 

Some of those members “are not in the position to speak out for themselves due to the risk of being blacklisted or having it impact their career opportunities,” Crabtree-Ireland said. Only a small percentage of SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000 members are well-known celebrities with piles of cash in reserve. 

“The vast majority are workers trying to get by,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “So things like keeping up with inflation or basic job protections are absolutely essential.”

 SAG-AFTRA’s eventual agreement with Hollywood studios included significant gains in wage minimums, better streaming residuals for hit shows and movies, and protections concerning AI digital replicas of actors and alterations to performances. 

“When we look back five years from now, 10 years from now, we will say, ‘This strike was worth it,’” Crabtree-Ireland said. “The things accomplished were worth the incredible disruption it caused to the economic lives and personal lives of our members and some of the other people in our industry.”

Striking alongside the Writers Guild until that union reached a deal in September, SAG-AFTRA helped fuel one of the most active labor years in recent memory. Auto workers and Kaiser Permanente health professionals also waged wide-scale, successful strikes in 2023. 

“Some people called it a ‘hot labor summer,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “From my point of view, I certainly hope, and I see every sign that this is going to be a hot labor decade.” 

SAG-AFTRA led the way for creative industries in addressing rapidly advancing – and human job-threatening – generative AI technology. 

“Our members have been affected by it sooner than just about anybody; we have seen the impact of AI-supported digital replication in feature films,” Crabtree-Ireland said, noting posthumous appearances by Carrie Fisher and Paul Walker in the “Star Wars” and “Fast and Furious” movie franchises. “Companies were willing to invest in employing that technology as very early adopters because of the financial gain of it. But as that technology has grown and evolved and become less expensive, it is even more clear that our members were right to have concerns about how it is implemented.” 

Crabtree-Ireland focused on AI when he visited King Hall in October to deliver the keynote at UC Davis Law Review’s symposium. The symposium coincided with the launch of the UC Davis Labor and Community Center of the Greater Capital Region. 

Crabtree-Ireland said he is excited his alma mater opened a labor center. “I am constantly evangelizing on behalf of King Hall. I don’t think our law school gets the recognition it deserves for the excellence it brings to bear in a number of areas. Certainly, labor law being one of them, and immigration law another.” 

He is “proud every day to be an alum” of a law school with a “public-service, public-interest human focus,” Crabtree-Ireland said. 

He first considered labor law as a career when he took a course taught by Professor Emerita Martha “Marty” West. Crabtree-Ireland pointed out that West also taught classmate Russell Naymark ’98, now in-house counsel for the International Federation of Musicians. 

“Between the musicians and the actors, King Hall has the labor side covered,” Crabtree-Ireland said with a laugh. 

A Memphis, Tennessee native, Crabtree-Ireland lives in Los Angeles with his husband, John, a fund-raising consultant, and their five children. The couple met as Georgetown undergraduates. John’s mother, retired family law practitioner Mary Campbell, is a UC Davis Law graduate from the Class of 1988. 

“I found out about King Hall because she would talk about her great experience there,” Duncan said of his mother-in-law. “John likes to say he went to law school twice – once with his mother, when he was a teenager, and the second time when he was in Davis with me.”