By DAVE MCNARY, Variety

The next round of contract wrangling between the guilds and the majors is fast approaching. The Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists have officially started prepping for their joint feature-primetime contract negotiations. The performers unions held their first "wages and working conditions" session Tuesday in New York and staged the second sesh Wednesday at SAG's Los Angeles headquarters.

More than two dozen such meetings to hammer out contract proposals have been scheduled for the next six weeks.

Negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are set to start on Sept. 27 and run through Nov. 15. As usual, AFTRA and SAG members who are active in producing projects are not allowed to attend the W&W committee meetings.

Reps for SAG, AFTRA and the AMPTP had no comment about the meetings.

SAG prexy Ken Howard, who has used his tenure to repair relations with AFTRA, was named in April to lead SAG's negotiating committee and as national head of the guild's wages and working conditions committee. AFTRA hasn't yet named the head of its negotiating committee.

AFTRA leaders agreed last week to a one-year extension of the union's network code contract -- which covers non-primetime TV work -- to Nov. 15, 2011, in order to clear the way for the primetime talks. AFTRA also agreed in the extension to a 2% hike in minimum program fees and a 0.5% hike in its retirement plan; it won't receive any increase in compensation for work on digital platforms.

SAG and AFTRA will jointly negotiate the primetime portion of the master contract, which expires June 30, 2011 -- a reversal from the previous round of contract talks, when AFTRA angrily split from SAG and negotiated its own primetime deal. SAG will also negotiate on terms of its feature film contract, over which AFTRA has no jurisdiction.

The last round of guild-AMPTP talks in 2007-08 were highly contentious over the issue of new media, leading to a 100-day strike by the Writers Guild of America.

In 2008 -- the last year for which figures are available -- SAG actors saw earnings decline 2.5% to $2 billion, mostly because TV earnings plunged 8.4% to $682 million as series went dark due to the WGA strike. Feature film earnings slid 2.4% to $620 million as studios cut spending after a pre-strike hike in production, while commercial earnings edged up 0.4% to $801 million.

The SAG-AFTRA negotiations will go ahead of talks for the Directors Guild of America, which announced a month ago that it would hold off on starting its formal talks until mid-November. The DGA's deal also expires on June 30, 2011.

The WGA has said it's in the process of determining its timetable for negotiations. The scribes' contract expires May 1, two months before those of its sister guilds. The DGA has traditionally gone first to the negotiations with the AMPTP, but SAG negotiated the seven-week bargaining period into its current contract.