Teamsters leaders are leveraging a relationship with the Trump administration to push for worker protections in the Paramount-Skydance merger as the future of one of Hollywood’s legacy studios hangs in the balance.
The union’s general president and head of its entertainment division met with Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr on Monday to raise concerns about the corporate marriage’s potential impact on the Hollywood workforce. Sean O’Brien, Lindsay Dougherty and two other union leaders called for Skydance’s past “pro-worker commitments” to be a condition of the merger or for some other kind of worker protection agreement, according to a recent FCC filing.
Submitted by an attorney for the Hollywood Teamsters, the filing argues that Skydance has previously described support for workers and unions but “news accounts of their statements to investors paint a very different picture of likely post-transaction job cuts.” The union met with Skydance executives twice to talk over potential workplace protection measures, including covering all new staffers with a union contract, according to Local 399 counsel David Goodfriend — but it has not received any commitments in return.
As a result, the union met with Carr on Monday in apparent hopes that Carr, who has promised tight scrutiny of the merger, uses his muscle to achieve measures that protect workers.
The meeting comes as fears about job cuts hover over Paramount’s offices in Los Angeles and New York following the deal’s closure. In Hollywood, the Teamsters represent thousands of drivers, casting and locations professionals and animal handlers and trainers.
Carr called the Teamsters meeting “productive” in a post on the social media platform X. In its own post the Teamsters said the FCC should “either should memorialize Skydance’s pro-worker commitments as a merger condition or encourage the parties to reach an agreement on how best to protect workers post-transaction.”
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Skydance, the Teamsters and the FCC for comment.
Under O’Brien’s leadership, the Teamsters union has engaged with the Trump administration even as other major American labor groups have distanced themselves. After meeting with Trump during his candidacy, the union broke with its decades-long streak of supporting Democratic candidates and declined to endorse any presidential nominee in 2024. O’Brien then became the first Teamsters president to speak at a Republican National Convention and his 1.3 million-strong labor group later supported the White House’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Labor, Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who in her first term in Congress was considered fairly labor-friendly.
But the union and Trump haven’t always seen eye to eye. On March 25 the labor group denounced the administration’s nomination of Crystal Carey as the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, with O’Brien calling her a “bad choice” who wants to “decimate labor unions and destroy American families.”
For his part, Carr has been eager to make the most of the opportunity that Skydance’s pending acquisition of Paramount has presented. He has in media appearances suggested the FCC will take 60 Minutes‘ editing of a Kamala Harris campaign interview into account in its review; that interview is of keen interest to Donald Trump, who has sued CBS over it. In January CBS said it would turn over transcripts and feeds of the interview to the FCC owing to pressure from Carr. Mergers and acquisitions of media companies is an area squarely in the FCC’s purview, which cannot be said of Section 230 and more tech-adjacent regulation that have also been Carr hobbyhorses.
Though a Georgetown-educated career D.C. insider, Carr has a history of trying to position himself as a friend to blue-collar workers and even one himself. The FCC vet has taken trips up to TV towers in places far from Washington, posing for photo ops and extolling laborers’ work. In February he did just that in Alabama, saying afterward “It is always a fun experience to get up in the air and hang with a tower crew.”