1st Qtr, 2020

Cathy Repola serves as National Executive Director of the Motion Picture Editors Guild (IATSE Local 700), a role that she has held since 2016 when the Board of Directors unanimously appointed her to the post.

Since then, she has fought for members in areas from benefits to working conditions. Repola comes from a union household in the entertainment industry. Her father, Ernie Repola, was a secretary/assistant business agent at IATSE Local 683 (Film Lab Technicians) and her older siblings all went to work in the industry in various post-production roles. “I wasn’t planning to work in the entertainment industry, so I went to college, got a degree, and was going to teach – or so I thought.

Then I got a temporary job within a union that represents clerical people in the industry. That temporary job turned into a permanent one. “I became a shop steward, my nickname quickly became ‘Norma Rae’ and after sitting through the collective bargaining process, the light bulb went off: This is what I want to do. I took some labor courses and begged the union in which I belonged, OPEIU, to hire me and eventually they did.

A few years later, I saw an ad in the trade magazines that a union [Motion Picture Editors Guild] was looking for an Assistant Executive Director. I had an interview with Ron Kutak, Executive Director, then the Board of Directors and the rest is history.” Repola relates that 27 years ago when she started at Local 700, there were 3000 members (including picture editors, sound editors, music editors, assistants, apprentices and librarians) and mainly two contracts they worked under. “Now we’ve got thousands of different contracts, 8300 members, national jurisdiction and we have to continue to increase our staff in order to keep on servicing the membership,” she says.

That’s not all. Repola was appointed chairwoman of the first-ever IATSE Women’s Committee (a role she held from 2015-2018). She received the IATSE President’s Award for Outstanding Woman Leader in 2017. Her commitment to the community has also seen her serve on the Board of FilmLA and chair its Community Relations Committee.

She was selected to participate in the #Times Up women’s production group committee. She is also a longtime advocate, fundraiser and volunteer for the Motion Picture & Television Fund. Looking ahead, she says, “Unions need to work from the bottom up and that became so clear [in 2018] when we were negotiating the new contract. All of a sudden there was a renewed interest in the union and that year we had five brand new board members installed who never were involved before. That level of interest continues to increase.”

The MPEG Membership Outreach Committee, among many things, promoted the idea of town-hall style membership meetings. “I will say a few words to open it up but the members come up with the topics, the things that are important to them,” Repola explains. Says MPEG president Alan Heim, ACE: “Cathy has awakened the members of the Guild and I look forward to working with her toward the best contract we can get at the next negotiations.”

“One of the things that is really important to me is to not remove myself too far from the membership,” Repola sums up of her approach. “I want to be accessible. I go to a lot of the membership mixers; I go to a lot of the events; I go and talk to members because I do want to understand who they are and what they are about, what their expectations are, what their disappointments in the union are. I want to know what they think, what they feel and what they care about.”