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SAG-AFTRA is expanding its reach into the influencer economy. In late April, the unions board unanimously voted to establish a new influencer committee, appointing New York-based lifestyle influencer Patrick Janelle as chair. SAG-AFTRAs involvement with influencers isnt new. In 2021, the union introduced an influencer agreement and waiver to cover branded content workan initiative that thousands of members have used. While that agreement marked a major step forward, it notably excluded original creative content, which remains the core of many creators livelihoods. It really became clear that if were going to continue to expand, and especially outside of the branded content space, we needed to have a formal structure in the union so that members who do this work could come together and give us guidance and leadership, SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told The Hollywood Reporter. Online content creation is a fast-growing but still loosely regulated industry. Since 2020, the number of full-time content creators in the U.S. has surged from 200,000 to 1.5 million in 2024, according to Axios. Despite this growth, pay structures and content guidelines vary significantly across platformsfrom Instagram Reels to long-form YouTube podcasts. To successfully advocate for creators across the board, the new committee plans to engage voices from all major platforms. The goal of this committee is to provide the union with necessary guidance and feedback from the creator’s perspective as SAG-AFTRA continues its efforts to assist creators in their pursuit of stable, safe, sustainable careers, Janelle posted to LinkedIn. As a SAG-AFTRA member, I’m honored and excited to be stepping up and representing my fellow creators and the industry at large. SAG-AFTRA doesnt have a clear count of how many of its 160,000 members are influencers, but Crabtree-Ireland points to the 2023 actors strike as a moment of convergence. Influencers found themselves in a gray area, as the union warned that any nonmember who took work with struck companies during the strike would be barred from future membership. Many chose solidarity over a paycheck, something the union now wants to show in return. During the theatrical strike, creators of influencers stepped up in big ways to stand by our members on strike, Crabtree-Ireland told The Hollywood Reporter. I think that just really cemented for us the obvious connection and nexus there.
Category:
E-Commerce
For one exhilarating moment, it sounded like Amazon was about to make a gutsy pro-consumer move. On Tuesday, Punchbowl News reported that the company would soon show how much Trumps tariffs are adding to the price of each product by specifying it right next to the products total listed price. That act of transparency would have been reminiscent of past precedent-shattering Amazon initiatives such as its 1995 introduction of user-written reviewsincluding ones so stinging as to drive customers away from a product. And then Trump 2.0 reality set in. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attacked the idea of tariff disclosure as hostile and political, another confirmation that Trumps oft-expressed contention that American consumers wouldnt bear the cost of higher tariffs never jibed with basic economics. An Amazon spokesperson claimed the notion had been under consideration only for the companys Temu-like Amazon Haul bargain store and was not going to happen. Trump himself chimed in to say he had called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who solved the problem very quickly and he did the right thing. To be fair, its unlikely that Amazon could have introduced anything like a universal tariff line item for the 600 million-plus products in its online store. It only designs a few devices itself, giving it the requisite intimate knowledge of their supply chain. Mostly, the company is a reseller, and more than half of the transactions on its site are third-party sales it facilitates for other merchants. It surely doesnt know how much tariffs added to the cost of every random HDTV it sellsand if it did, presidential whim might change the math from day to day. Still, even if Amazon breaking out tariffs at the point of purchase turned out to be a fleeting fantasy, it was an instructive mental exercisemaybe even a powerful idea thats tough to unimagine once youve thought about it. Why should anyone care about the percentage of an items price represented by tariffsa form of taxation most of us have cheerfully ignored until recently, even though it has a 236-year history in the U.S.? First of all, a reliable accounting would counter misinformation spread by the president. Hes backpedaled some on his past stance that tariffs only burden manufacturers in other countries. However, absent dramatic developments such as iPhones suddenly going for $2,000, it may be tough to tell exactly what his increases are doing to our purchasing power. Explaining it on an item-by-item basis would help. But the impact of tariffs on my own wallet is just one reason why I crave hard facts. Trumps interpretation of global tradethat China is ripping off the U.S. because we buy more stuff from it than it buys from usis plainly ridiculous. His attempt to use tariffs to spark a renaissance in American manufacturing is already backfiring, given that factories here need parts produced elsewhere, and other countries are retaliating with stiffer tariffs on U.S. products. (Fun fact: A Corning plant in Harrrodsburg, Kentucky, exports the Gorilla Glass pervasive in phones and other devices.) All of this, I already know. Yet except for a few high-profile items like the iPhonewhose production Apple may ramp up in India to avoid tariffs on Chinese importsI dont claim to understand much about the endlessly complex tales behind the products I buy. The tariff backstory for individual purchases were considering making is arguably a more valuable data point than a superficial, potentially misleading Made in the U.S.A. or Made in China label. It would be a visceral reminder of how fundamentally connected the world economy is. Globalists and isolationists alike would get something out of it. Its not just tariffs. The more I ponder the situation, the less informed I feel as a consumer. I tend to take the Nutrition Facts information box on packaged foods for granted and rarely dig any deeper than the figures on calories and fat. But its hard to imagine life without that box. When I refreshed my memory about its history, I was startled to learn it came into existence only a little over 30 years ago, mandated by a 1990 bill signed by President George H. W. Bush. Before that, food makers got to choose what they disclosedor didntabout the products they sold. An equivalent box for other goods would make us all smarter. Theres plenty of fodder beyond tariffs: other taxes, product recalls, warranty information, carbon footprint, and on and on. In the unlikely event that a Nutrition Facts for Everything bill passes Trumps desk, hes not ging to sign it, so Im filing the idea away for future reference. In the meantime, I hope there are merchants out there willing to post tariff numbers, at least for certain products. Countless companies have spent this entire century trying to keep up with Amazon, often by copying its innovations. Heres a rare chance for them to gain an edge on the e-commerce behemoth by going where it wont. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Why online shopping feels like a chore in 2025A new Criteo study finds that most shoppers now view online shopping as functional, overwhelming, and even lonelysparking a renewed interest in in-store retail and personalized digital experiences. Read More Duolingo doubles its language offerings with AI-built coursesThe edtech giant launched 148 new classes developed by generative AI as it phases out contract roles and accelerates course creation. Read More This new app helps chronic latecomers stay on timeLately sends timed alerts, tracks progress, and gamifies punctuality to help users overcome time blindness and improve daily time management. Read More The NFT market fell apart. Brands are still paying the priceOnce a marketing gold rush, Web3 bets by brands like Nike and DraftKings are now ending in courtroom battlesand collapsing consumer trust. Read More Skype saved me in a war zone. Now it’s going awayMicrosoft is shutting down the app that helped me call home from Ukraine during a Russian invasion. Read More How to find and cancel forgotten online subscriptions that are costing you a fortuneYou can save a lot by ditching online subscription services such as apps and video, music, and news sites. Here’s how to do itfast. Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
Donald Trump had a message for Americas children this week: Two dolls is plenty. Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open,’ the president said while discussing his 145% tariffs on China. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Trumps new message of austerity oddly echoes Jimmy Carters era-defining “Crisis of Confidence” speech from 1979. Its a far cry, though, from the gilded lifestyle Trump is famous for and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Vote Trump and your incomes will soar, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania last September, without explaining just how hed make that happen. Your net worth will skyrocket. Your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down. Still reeling from the persistent sting of inflation, a slim majority of voters proved amenable to Trumps message of imminent relief. According to a Gallup poll from October, 52% of voters said the economy would be extremely important to their presidential votethe highest number since the Great Recession election in 2008. After the election, two-thirds of voters described the economy as not good in exit polls. If Trump came into office with a mandate, as he repeatedly claims, it was a mandate to “Make Groceries Less Pricey Again.” So far, Trumps promised stratospheric incomes and subterranean grocery prices have yet to materialize. Instead, after Trumps tariffs, recession indicators are everywhere. Tariff surcharges are showing up in some receipts and websites, and pointedly not showing up in others. Meanwhile, YouTubers and TikTokers are going all in on homesteading as a way to thrive in lean times. Even some senior Trump officials are reportedly beginning to hoard groceries and supplies in advance of high prices and shortages to come. Trumps widely reported comments on frugal doll-shopping mark his starkest appraisal yet of the gale-force economic headwinds consumers are now facing. Previously, Trump had only hinted at the possibility of economic turmoil from his tariffs. Throughout his campaign, he framed tariffs as a cost-free way to stop foreign countries from taking advantage of the U.S., bring back domestic manufacturing, rid consumers of all that pesky inflation, and generally transform America into an economic Hercules. It wasnt until after the election that he refused to rule out higher prices as a result of his tariffs, and not until after hed already been re-inaugurated did he finally admit there will be some pain. For the past few months, Trump has been quiet about what that pain will actually feel like in practice. Will it be a pinprick or something closer to a shattered fibula? As recently as March, the president was assuring Americans, We’re going to become so rich, you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money. On Wednesday, however, following reports that the U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter of his term, Trump finally defined the contours of hardship to come. With his statement promoting the two-doll lifestyle, Trump flatly relented that pain would take the form of higher prices, scarcity, and diminished buying power. His subdued confession sits in stark contrast to his first term in office. In 2020, when COVID hit, Trump seemed loath to ask Americans to make sacrifices. Trump left it to the states to decide whether to advise citizens to shelter in place or not. He also refused to mandate mask use, despite the advice of top immunologists. (I want people to have a certain freedom, and I dont believe in that, he said at the time.) Of course, it would be a lot easier to take at face value the president’s new embrace of American sacrifice and the two-doll lifestyle if it wasnt coming from a billionaire who thinks other billionaires deserve more billions. As the president advises parents on how to budget, his supporters in Congress are hard at work figuring out how much they can cut from Medicaid to ensure Trumps tax bill passes muster. It seems that part of the calculus guiding his tariff strategy is knowing he and his fellow billionaires will be fine no matter what.
Category:
E-Commerce
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