Equity, the trade union for performers, creatives, and entertainment industry workers, is having a moment. The union has achieved landmark wins on holiday pay for employees of QDos Pantomimes and proposed job cuts at Phoenix Dance Theatre in Leeds, as well as organising protests against Andrew Lloyd Webber and his treatment of the Cinderella cast and crew. We have also been having animated internal discussions about the policy direction of the union, covering topics from culture war to arts organising and the environment (which has led to the creation of the Equity for a Green New Deal network), amongst many others. It’s an exciting time to be involved.
As arts workers, we are frequently confronted with conflicting desires: the need for ‘job satisfaction’—to make great work as artists—and the need for better pay and working conditions. Being caught between the identities of ‘artist’ and ‘worker’ enables our exploitation and limits our potential for resistance.
In the theatre, where pay is very low but the work can often be very enjoyable, this is an especially tricky contradiction to resolve. Theatre work can be both difficult and joyful. We build community through the collective endeavour of producing a piece of work that aims to bring pleasure to others. In this sense, the rehearsal room can be an almost utopian space, where problems can be resolved, obstacles overcome, resources shared, games played, connections forged and a mountain climbed together in aim of making something wonderful. If we follow William Morris’s gloss on John Ruskin in defining art as the expression of “[Humankind’s] pleasure in labour,” and believe therefore, “it is possible for [humankind] to rejoice in [their] work”, theatre work is in one sense very artful, and in another, not at all.
As in the production of any commodity, there are strict pressures on time, huge amounts of overworking and underpayment, as well as bullying and harassment and all the other disciplines and depredations of capital.
The struggle over pay, conditions, and working hours is made substantially more difficult by this ‘pleasure in labour’. There are real contradictions at play here: we are not being duped by theatre producers (and ultimately by capital). The pleasure in producing something that we are immensely proud of, and which we believe is valuable for the world is real, and is what keeps us showing up.
Perhaps because of this, a lot of the discourse concerning theatre work focuses on the importance of making work that is of good artistic quality. The question of theatre workers having good lives tends to fall by the wayside. Of course, part of having a good life is that “pleasure in labour” described by Ruskin, but there is also a tradition of socialist thought and practice which draws on Ruskin, which imagines aspects of artistic labour as prefigurative whilst also grasping the horrors of what capitalism does to that labour and its products. The drive to throw everything into our work, to make it the best it can be either for the love of it, or in hopes of furthering our careers, can be detrimental to the quality of the work, but more importantly, it can be detrimental to our lives outside of work.
Workers or Artists?
As I’ve mentioned, as workers in the theatre we are caught between two distinct self-conceptions: our selves as workers and our selves as artists (see this video for more on this). As an artist, I want to make fantastic work with care and heart and enthusiasm; work that pushes me and my collaborators into interesting directions, that explores the boundaries of the artform, and that may mean spending endless hours working on it. As a worker, I want decent breaks, convenient hours, to be treated fairly and paid properly, and to have time outside of work to relax and explore different facets of my life. These perspectives sometimes align, but mostly they are in conflict.
While there are imaginable reforms that could lesson this conflict to an extent, it would be a question of slightly ameliorating the tensions, rather than resolving them for good.
Complicating this further is the presence of very privileged people in the industry. These are people who do not need to make a living from the work, and who therefore do not need to organise for better pay. These people may even undercut those struggles by always being ready to take jobs, regardless of the rate of pay. Theatre work then includes as well as those of us (the majority) who have to always think about the money, very privileged people who can engage solely in passion projects whether paid or not.
The Show Must Go On: What happens when we focus on making art not work
The drive to create good work despite the scarcity of resources means, in practice, a lot of exploitation. Stage managers are forced to undertake roles that are not part of their job description in order to make the first stagger through happen straight after lunch. Actors spend time learning lines without payment. Creative team members on fixed fees end up working so many hours in pre-production that their hourly wage, if calculated, would equate to many times less than the national minimum. All of this is supportive of—and supported by—the insistence that the show MUST go on, no matter what.
Ironically, it is precisely those aspects of the work that are prefigurative of something utopian—the mutual reliance of colleagues, the sense of comradeship which means you don’t want to let your fellow workers down—that end up contributing to our exploitation. In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that while other trade unions discuss transitioning to 4 day work weeks, we in the theatre are still stuck working 6 day weeks.
Why is this difficult to navigate?
“Find a job you enjoy doing,” goes the oft-repeated axiom, “and you will never have to work a day in your life”. As theatre workers, having found a job we enjoy doing, we are then encouraged to see this job as anything but work. This has real consequences for many workers, who really do feel grateful simply to be given an opportunity, no matter how bad the wages, or how obviously the exploitation. This sense of gratitude can discourage us from doing some radical, galvanising, and necessary moaning about our work. In other words, we are discouraged from identifying as workers—which, conveniently, means we are discouraged from framing our struggles in terms of exploitation, solidarity, and collective power.
As workers producing commodities, our struggles for a good life are different from our artistic struggles to create good work. As artists, we need craft and passion; as workers we need solidarity, militancy and tactics. But the truth is that many people only want to escape the rat race, not join together for collective strength. Their struggles are individualised: they relentlessly compete for jobs, fighting for dominance or over scraps.
Sometimes our work can be nourishing and illuminating. It might bring us a sense of collective joy and purpose. Or we might see this job as a stepping stone to work that is more fulfilling, but is just over the horizon. Often our work is not quite as pleasurable as we might have imagined. At times, it can be exhausting and all-consuming. Our employment, too, is in the hands of people who are also precariously employed, and are likely to be experiencing similar cycles of being underworked, followed by being overworked and underpaid.
These cycles make solidarity particularly tricky. The number of people in our industry currently out of work vastly outnumber those in work. And because the work is so entangled with our creative drives—and because one job often comes with the promise of future work—there always is a reserve army of more-than-willing labour ready to take our places should we refuse to be exploited. Arts cuts and the cost of living crisis have deepened these issues further.
The relentless search for work can be soul-sapping, so it is no wonder that people are often filled with disproportionate gratitude towards their employers, and less inclined to check the terms of their contract. As the economist Joan Robinson noted:
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.1
This is as true of our industry as any any other. The misery of performing 6 days a week in a poorly-reviewed show that you don’t enjoy is nothing compared with the misery of auditioning for years without getting a job, and worrying about what people will think if you quit.
What is to be done?
So how can we fix this? Primarily, we need solidarity and collective strength. We need to organise together to develop the sort of tactics and militancy that can make us strong in the face of exploitation. We must engage in our workplaces as Equity deps and company members, on elected committees and council, and in the union’s networks (including the Equity for a Green New Deal network). Likewise, we must connect to wider social struggles and movements, including the whole trade union movement.
The difficulties are many, but so too are the opportunities. I have a lot of hope—a lot of faith in the optimism of our collective will. Collectively, we have the means to make our lives significantly better. The first step will be acknowledging our roles as workers. From there, we can organise together to dismantle obstacles and find the opportunities to transform our working conditions—and, ultimately, transform our world.
-
Joan Robinson. [1962]. 1964. Economic Philosophy. London: Pelican. p. 46. ↩