What Both Sides of the Table Bring to Union Payroll

Plenty of producers assume that taking on a union project means one of two things: building an in-house labor relations department, or handing the production to a major studio that already has one. Neither is true. Wrapbook handles union productions with a labor relations team led by experts who have spent decades in the rooms where these agreements get written, debated, and enforced.

We sat down with Paul Schoeman, who leads that team as our Senior Director of Labor Relations, to talk about how a career on both sides of the bargaining table shapes the support Wrapbook brings to union work.

A career on both sides of the table

Paul's start in the industry was in front of the camera, as a child performer in a baby food commercial. He stayed on that side through his teens, picked up props and costuming work during college, and eventually landed an office job in executive production at Spelling in the 1990s. That's where he decided he wanted to work in labor relations, and where he learned how closed off the field was to anyone trying to break in.

His way in came through a job at the Contract Services Administration Trust Fund, scheduling grievances and arbitrations. The work was routine, but it put him in regular contact with the heads of every major below-the-line union and nearly every labor relations professional in town. A payroll company recruited him soon after, and within a few years he was running its labor relations, pension and health, liens and deductions, workers' compensation, and legal functions, and sitting in on negotiations directly. That work put him on the radar of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), where he represented producers and the major studios at the bargaining table. He describes it as his dream job and one of the hardest things he's done, with a punishing standard for accuracy and a turnover rate to match.

Then he did something unusual. People who cross between labor and management almost always move from the union side to the studio side, and they stay there because it pays better. Paul went the other way on purpose, spending five years at SAG-AFTRA to understand the union side from the inside.

"I was willing to take the pay cut. The benefits are really good, but I wanted to learn."

That decision is what makes his perspective hard to replicate. By the time he came to Wrapbook five and a half years ago, he'd represented producers and performers, sat on both sides of a negotiation, and built relationships across a field where it usually takes decades to earn any. That's the background he now brings to the productions Wrapbook works with.

What sitting on both sides teaches you

What makes that path valuable is the trust it makes possible. Because Paul has real history on both sides, and because both sides know he keeps their confidence, he can operate in a space most people can't get to.

"This entire industry is built around relationships. It's who you know and how far back you've gone with those relationships. If I've worked with them for 20 years, 30 years, and there's never been bad blood, that's somebody I trust."

That vantage point also gave him a clearer read on how labor and management actually relate. From the outside they look like opponents, but the shared goal, in his experience, is keeping people working, and that's what drives negotiations that can run for weeks without a day off.

"Everybody thinks we're very dissimilar. We're actually much more similar than most people would ever realize."

The most practical thing both sides taught him is the difference between what an agreement says and how it operates. Every union agreement has its written language, and then it has custom and practice, the accumulated understanding of how that language gets applied, which usually governs in a dispute.

"There's what's in the book, and then there's what's done. And custom and practice generally overrides what's in the written word."

That knowledge only comes from years of exposure, which is why seniority in the field is counted in decades. Paul has drafted a large share of the industry's wage tables and helped write agreements still in use today, so when a dispute turns on what a clause was meant to do, he can often speak to the original intent, because he was in the room when it was written.

What it means for a production without a labor department

Here's where this matters for producers. The major studios employ career labor relations staff who've been at it for decades. Independent producers and mini-majors don't have that, and most can't justify a full-time labor team or afford one on their own. Paul built Wrapbook's team with those productions in mind, so that expertise no single independent could support alone can be shared across many.

"Independent producers don't have labor relations. They lean on us, the payroll company, for that. And honestly, they generally cannot afford us by themselves, nor do they need us full-time."

For a production, that shows up as access to relationships it wouldn't otherwise have. When a client is weighing a deal with a union and has real budget constraints, the team can reach out to counterparts they've known for 25 or 30 years. A question from someone with that kind of history lands very differently than a cold call from a producer.

Earlier in his career, Paul points to a production heading into Louisiana that was three days from its start date when the accounting staff learned they couldn't be treated the way they'd been promised, and could only be treated as union. The crew was already booking flights home, and the schedule was locked to talent availability, so a slip would have ended the film. He got in, worked the problem, and resolved it within about two hours so the production could keep its start date. The film went on to considerable acclaim.

The team behind the work

Paul is quick to point out that the work is a team effort. The people on it are ones he's known for at least 30 years, most with two or three decades of their own experience. 

Steve Dayan came out of Teamsters Local 399 and sits on the California Film Commission. Patrick Delaney was a business representative at IATSE Local 600. Lon Huber spent his career representing performers and auditing on the SAG side. 

Each holds the deepest relationships in a particular corner of the union world, which means that when a production or a crew member hits a problem with a specific union, the person with the longest relationship there can often calm it quickly. A frustrated driver's whole posture changes, Paul says, once he's on the phone with someone who used to run Teamsters Local 399 and knows him by name. For a producer, that de-escalation is one fewer problem to manage.

Underneath all of it is a plain conviction about what's actually being handled.

"That paycheck is someone's livelihood. It is what is putting a roof over their head, food on their table. It is their pension that they're going to retire off of. It's their health coverage for them, their significant other, their family."

He tells the story of a crew member who lost access to benefits because two numbers got transposed in a system, and how he stayed on the phone to trace it and got a health-plan contact to fix it the same day. That instinct comes from years of having worked on sets himself, and from knowing what's at stake when the paperwork goes wrong.

Wrapping up

Union work is within reach for productions that don't have a studio-sized back office behind them. Wrapbook processes union payroll and brings labor relations expertise on staff, so a production can take on a union project and stay on top of the people, the agreements, and the customs involved.

If you're weighing a union project and want to know how that support would work for your production, reach out to the Wrapbook team. We're happy to walk you through what union payroll looks like with a labor relations team behind it.