The Entertainment Union Coalition (EUC), including the California IATSE Council, Directors Guild of America, LiUNA! Local 724, Teamsters Local 399, Writers Guild of America West, American Federation of Musicians Local 47, IBEW Local 40 and SAG-AFTRA, has mounted an aggressive campaign to pressure California lawmakers to expand and protect the state’s Film and Television Jobs Program 4.0.
After successfully lobbying for the program to more than double, from $330 million to $750 million annually, the coalition is now demanding that the subsidy be made uncapped and further “modernized.” Gov. Gavin Newsom has been a leading champion of the expansion, presenting the tax credits as a means of keeping production and jobs in California.
The immediate target of the unions’ campaign is SB 122, a sweeping budget measure backed by the Democratic establishment, including Newsom. The legislation extends California’s existing $5 million annual limitation on business tax credits through 2029. Beginning in 2030, it establishes a permanent limit of $5 million or 70 percent of a corporation’s tax liability, whichever is greater. Credits blocked by the limitation can be carried forward or, under specified conditions, made refundable.
The measure was driven by the state’s fiscal crisis and is aimed broadly at corporate tax credits, particularly credits that have allowed large corporations to accumulate enormous write-offs. Newsom and legislative Democrats have presented the limits as a way to protect state revenues and fund essential programs. Film and television production was not the principal target. Its tax credits were caught in the net of a broad fiscal measure.
This is precisely what makes the dispute politically revealing. The same Democratic establishment that expanded the film subsidy to $750 million is now imposing limits on corporate tax credits because the state cannot indefinitely finance the concessions demanded by competing industries. The contradiction is not an accident. It exposes the logic of a system in which governments compete to hand public resources to corporations while simultaneously confronting the fiscal consequences of that competition.
The EUC responds by demanding that film and television credits be exempted. Because the film program itself has a separate annual allocation, the coalition denounces the business-credit limitation as a “double cap” that will supposedly make California uncompetitive.
But this argument accepts the premise that has produced the crisis: that workers must compete against one another to persuade corporations where to invest.
Hellbound and Down 