2023 was a pivotal year for Hollywood unions, with actors and writers calling for historic double strikes in the name of reshaping a transforming industry. As that battle unfolded over issues like artificial intelligence and pay in the streaming age, chief negotiators for the striking unions, as well as the directors union, won the highest salaries of any union leader in Hollywood.

SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland leads the way with a gross salary of $1,016,182, according to the labor group’s latest LM-2 report, a form of annual financial reporting for unions. He’s followed by Directors Guild of America national executive director Russell Hollander, with a gross salary of $775,000, and Writers Guild of America West executive director Ellen Stutzman, whose gross salary is $682,692. (Figures compiled by The Hollywood Reporter (includes LM-2 data from 2024 and 2023, as of latest filings, covering the period from January 1, 2023 to April 30, 2024. These salaries represent union leadership salaries during the 2023 Hollywood strikes.)

During that same period, Matthew Loeb, the IATSE’s top executive for 16 years, came in fourth with a gross salary of $553,487. Broadway actors’ Equity executive director Alvin Vincent Jr. earned $437,528, while outgoing Motion Picture Editors Guild national executive director Cathy Repola and former WGA East executive director Lowell Peterson earned $374,210 and $349,061, respectively.

The Teamsters’ top entertainment executives, Thomas J. O’Donnell of Local 817 and Lindsay Dougherty of Local 399, are at the bottom of the list. The New York-area executive earned $312,325, while the union’s Los Angeles-based executive earned $272,962. (Dougherty’s figure combines her salary as a senior executive of Local 399 and her earnings as a vice president of the international union.)

Some entertainment union leaders can be among the highest-paid union officials in the country. Only 90 out of 12,753 national union employees earned more than $350,000 in 2023, according to LM-2 filings, according to Marick Masters, a professor emeritus at Wayne State University’s Mike Ilitch School of Business who studies union spending habits. (The data does not include elected leaders, who can command high salaries, or union locals. It looks at total compensation, including reimbursements for official business.)

Masters notes that the leaders of the Air Line Pilots Association, the National Football League Players Association, and some entertainment industry unions were well paid in 2023. “Airline pilots, professional athletes, directors, movie actors, and writers have a lot of very well-paid people among their members,” Masters says. “People at the top end of the scale make a lot of money and can afford to pay staff to represent them.”

Entertainment union executive salaries don’t seem “grossly disproportionate,” according to Robert Bruno, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Labor and Employment Relations and director of the Labor Education Program. Key factors to consider are the average or median earnings of union members, the size of the union, the contribution of workers to the wealth of their industry and the value of individual contracts, he says. Given that union executives work in entertainment, an industry that can pay stratospheric incomes to some unionized creatives, those numbers “wouldn’t be out of the range that you would expect,” he adds.

Another related factor to consider is how much the industry pays its CEOs, to give union leaders a market position, Bruno says. And Hollywood studios and streamers certainly aren’t skimping on pay. In 2023, as the dual strike dragged on for months, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and chairman David Zaslav, Disney CEO Bob Iger and former Paramount chairman and CEO Bob Bakish all earned more than $30 million, nearly 30 times Crabtree-Ireland’s last reported earnings.