Spanish voiceover actors who are used to dub popular US and British TV shows are staging a series of one-day strikes, with claims that they are getting paid the same fees that they could have got 25 years ago.
Unions representing 400 actors, whose contractual terms have been broken by their employers, and are calling for overtime and holiday pay rate hikes, as well as an improvement to end-of-contract redundancy payments.
Voiceover artists work on essentially a freelance basis, with job contracts lasting days or even hours, meaning they are not full-time, permanent employees of their firms but are called in, for example, to dub one episode of a series at a time.
Their job terms are covered by an agreement signed eight years ago between unions and industry bosses, and which has never been updated. Over 16 meetings have been held between employee representatives and the main umbrella firm since the end of February, with no significant steps forward and the management ‘constantly stalling for time’,
according to the unions.
