The relevance of ideas in a union’s organization of contingent workers: ‘Here come the fairy people!’

Introduction

Are actors workers? Given their unusual visibility and longevity as an occupational group, the lack of research into performance labour processes and their regulation is of analytical interest. Performers are commonly regarded, inside and outside the academy, as exotic and atypical; both presumably to such a degree that there is little to be learned in any broad sense from studying them. This ascribed assumption (there is no research on why scholars of work do not research specific occupations) has inevitably extended to the UK entertainment industry trade union, Equity.

Very little research has been carried out on Equity (an exception being Heery et al., 2004) and it is arguable that this is because what the majority of its members do has not been regarded as ‘real’ work, including by fellow trade unionists. At a meeting of the United Trades and Labour Council, the general secretary of the Australian Metalworkers Union greeted the Australian Equity delegation with ‘Here come the fairy people!’ This joke, reported in interview with the author by a former Australian Equity official, represents a widespread perception of performers and their representatives as operating outside what counts as recognized, conventional work.

There has been a more developed tradition of considering the performing arts as work in the USA (including Gemmill, 1927; Gray and Seeber, 1996). In the UK, with the recent exception of Smith and McKinlay’s (2009) discussion of a range of ‘creative labour’ processes, academic work has concentrated on entertainment industry production or technical workers, or ‘cultural occupations’ more broadly (e.g. Davies and Lindley, 2003; Feist, 2001; Towse, 1996). Despite contemporary policy emphasis on the creative and cultural sectors (e.g. DCMS, 2001) and increasing focus on nonstandard occupations more generally, the ancient occupation of acting has remained largely absent from employment research.

The uncommon exceptions include Layder (1984), who explores actors’ labour markets and career commitment; Heery et al.’s (2004) study of freelance worker representation; and Haunschild and Eikhof’s (2009) discussion of German theatre actors as self-employed employees. Marsden (2009: 1) uses actors as exemplars of new segmented labour market patterns in project-based work such as IT and management consulting and associated ‘extended entry tournaments’ (rather than traditionally structured labour markets) characterized by ‘ease of entry at the bottom […] and a struggle for access to the higher status, stable, positions within the occupation’.

Noting the relative lack of focus on this area is more than a passing comment on a research gap and constitutes part of the analytical framework of this article, which explores the relevance of ideas in accounting for industrial relations (IR) phenomena. The article has two, linked, aims. The first is to consider an under-researched trade union formed specifically to organize a previously marginal category of worker (contingent) that is now an object of increasing interest. The second is to use this exploration to consider the interrelation of ideological, historical and economic influences in work and employment.

Given the lack of familiarity with Equity in IR research and the ascribed reasons why, the approach taken here is to consider structural aspects of its members’ labour market environment and in parallel explore the ‘unionateness’ component of Blackburn’s (1967) concept of union character. In doing so, the explanatory relevance of ideology in the labour process is considered, in relation specifically to unionateness and more generally in relation to the construction of performing work qua work. As Edwards (2006) argues, the analytical possibilities of ideology as both expressing and challenging forms of power should not be neglected. Edwards focuses on the constraints and possibilities in action shaped by ‘frames of reference’ that ‘appear to embrace taken-for-granted assumptions and ways of thinking about the world’ (2006: 574, 575). Identification of the importance of the relationship between ways of thinking (about particular worlds), existing power relations (institutions, practices) and possibilities of action, is key to organization of the article.

Both structural and ideological dimensions are highlighted in consideration of pay issues and the article focuses on a principal source of work for British actors, regional subsidized repertory (subrep) theatre. This is through discussion of the area in general, and in relation to industrial action taken by Equity in 1997 over level of minima in subrep and a contemporary version of that campaign in 2010. Key aspects of the union and occupational environments are established, and the historical-ideological contexts in which the union and its members are embedded are explored. These discussions are used to throw light on central aspects of the pay campaigns, demonstrating the persistent significance of the ideological/structural interaction in this occupational area and the broader utility of analysing IR in this way.

Empirical bases

This article explores data on Equity’s operation from three pieces of research by the author, two completed and one current. The first was an analysis of Equity through a strike in one of its key organizing sectors, subrep theatre (Dean, 1998). The second explored gender and performer employment in theatre and television including, inter alia, Equity’s engagement with pay issues (Dean, 2004). The third project examines change and adaptation in the subsidized theatre sector; here focusing on Equity’s recent campaign to, again, increase minimum pay levels. The research for the completed studies centred on the two principal sources of work for actors, television (46%) and theatre (28%), largely regional subrep theatres (Skillset, 2005) and used analysis of semi-structured interviews and primary documentary data from Equity and employer organizations. Across the two studies, 98 interviews were conducted with a range of Equity’s senior officials, full-time officers, lay officers and members (performers from across demographic and career status ranges), employer association representatives, employers such as producers and commissioning executives and employer-proxies such as agents and casting directors. The current project is using questionnaires to theatre employers to chart structural changes in subrep operation and semi-structured interviews with these employers and with union officials. While the studies had different empirical research aims, implicit issues were drawn out that could be accounted for within a distinct theoretical framework, developed in this article.

Equity and its contingent worker members

Equity was formally organized as a trade union in 1930 (as the British Actors’ Equity Association) and founded on the most traditional of trade union principles – that workers with little or no individual power combine together for protection (Sanderson, 1984). However, there was a factor that set it apart from traditional unions: Equity was the creation of an elite. It arose from the concern of established, successful workers – the ‘stars’ – for the conditions of the struggling, anonymous majority of workers. It is unique among trade unions in that its inception was arranged around the mahogany dining table (a prized Equity artefact) of a Dame of the British Empire, May Whitty, and that its commitment to a closed shop was arranged at a luncheon given at the Savoy Hotel by another Dame of the British Empire, Marie Tempest (Macleod, 1981). These origins, in conjunction with the ambiguous status of performing as work, have shaped Equity as an organization and the ways in which it operates.

Equity has a membership of approximately 37,000 (PAPG, 2009: 30). It organizes workers in most sectors of the entertainment industry, including stage managers, directors, choreographers and comedians; however, the largest membership group is and has always been actors (Macleod, 1981; Skillset, 2005: 23). Equity’s previous General Secretary observed in interview that it was a union of individuals of wildly differing levels of training, experience, aims and objectives, all of whom were essentially self-employed businesses although they had National Insurance classification as employees (Inland Revenue, 2003). Analytically actors can be categorized as ‘dependent self-employed’ (Equity, 2008; Heery et al., 2004: 21) as they are workers who ‘do not have a contract of employment, but who nevertheless contract to supply their own personal services to the employer and who to some degree are economically dependent on the employer’s business’ (Burchell et al., 1999: 1).

Although performers largely fall into the freelance category of professional contingent workers, the majority share with other insecure workers significant characteristics such as low and variable earnings, high risk of unemployment and temporary job tenure (Heery and Abbott, 2000: 12–13). Equity members’ work is individualized, infrequent, short-term and unpredictable. Crucially, the permanent performer unemployment rate was conservatively estimated by union and employer interviewees as at least 85 per cent. Construction industry workers organized by UCATT could be described in similar terms (Lockyer and Scholarios, 2007; Wood, 1979). However the situation is complicated for actors and their union by several factors. These include the effective ‘typed’ segmentation of labour markets, which means that performers are largely in competition with those performers/fellow members most like themselves in age, appearance and status (Dean, 2008a). These factors are complicated further by the vocational motivation to work (performers will often effectively pay to act) and the competitive and personalized nature of the process itself which, broadly, encourages a desire to please and attendant reluctance to make waves (see also Antcliff et al., 2007). This combination of issues is significant in consideration of strategies to affect pay and conditions. A senior Equity official said: ‘Our members won’t go public – you get lots of stories with members phoning up but then saying they won’t make a fuss … If someone gets a bad reputation in this business they don’t work again.’ The similarities with the construction industry are apparent, although there is no suggestion of employers consulting worker ‘blacklists’ (Evans and Chamberlain, 2009). The situation was summarized pragmatically by one experienced performer:

The bottom line for everyone is will this bastard employ me again?… Often getting the job is the beginning of your trouble. You’re not in a position to say no to anything. It’s a brutal mix – you’re like a lovesick teenager waiting for the phone to ring, you’re a professional and you’re poor. And employers know it and know that there are plenty more where you came from.

This summary gives an insight into the dispiriting realities of Marsden’s ‘extended entry tournaments’ and Heery and Abbott (2000: 155) note that the trend towards more insecure employment is challenging for unions, as such workers are ‘difficult to organize and represent’. They also note, however, that the very dimension that makes organization and representation difficult – insecurity – might also encourage worker demand for protection. This supposition was indirectly supported by Equity’s then General Secretary when he said in interview with the author that the structural factors of acting employment, such as competition and geographical dispersal, had the opposite effect to a ‘commonsense’ expectation of individualized responses:

It’s because they see their vulnerability individually staring them in the face virtually every day of their career that they realize that individually they can’t do anything about the general conditions under which they work.

In considering these issues, it becomes clear that, despite often atypical ideas about work and pay, Equity and its members are recognizably mundane in an IR context. Mundanity and atypicality both become more intelligible when located in a conceptually- and historically-informed framework.

Framing the issues: character, unionateness, ideology

Blackburn (1967), in his study of white-collar unionism in the banking industry, argued that the social significance of a trade union is assessed by its degree of unionization, a concept comprising variables of ‘completeness’ and ‘character’. Completeness corresponds to density. Given the intermittent and dispersed nature of performers’ work, density is not easy to ascertain, but both union and employer interviewees estimated union density as high. The then chief executive of the (film and television) Producers Industrial Relations Service observed that: ‘Equity would still have, in membership, the vast majority of UK artists’. It is difficult to assess this claim, an interesting one given that the disappearance of the pre-entry closed shop through the Employment Act 1990 means that performers no longer require union membership for access to work. There are different internal views on the operational importance of density in Equity’s case (considered below in relation to ‘stars’); however, the important dimension for the purposes of this article is unionization’s second variable, character.

Blackburn (1967: 18) famously defined the key component of character as unionateness, i.e. ‘the commitment of an organization to the general principles and ideology of trade unionism’. Blackburn’s list of elements that comprise unionateness are, as he acknowledges, problematic in terms of measurement and weighting. However, they remain analytically useful, in particular the first three elements:

It regards collective bargaining and the protection of the interests of members, as employees, as its main function, rather than, say, professional activities or welfare schemes […] It is independent of employers for purposes of negotiation […] It is prepared to be militant, using all forms of industrial action which may be effective. (1967: 19–20)

The ‘ideology of trade unionism’ core of unionateness is not explicitly defined: its characterization is largely circular as Blackburn takes ideology to ‘apply to all attitudes of acceptance or rejection relating to trade-union character’ (1967: 19). However, an implicit element is that in broad terms, as Blackburn later notes, trade unions ‘assume that employers and workers have different interests, while staff associations believe in the common interests of employer and employee’ (1967: 97). For Blackburn’s bank workers, common interests were tied to a ‘middle class ideology’ involving identification with the employer and traditional white collar conception of occupational status (1967: 110). An assumption in Blackburn’s analysis was that white-collar occupations were relatively homogeneous in terms of the social classes they drew from and in the ingrained political perspectives of individuals joining the occupation, although his analysis makes clear that these factors do not have straightforward connotations for unionateness. In contrast, a striking aspect of professional acting as a vocationally driven, ‘type’-influenced occupation and its ‘extended entry tournaments’ structure, is that access to higher education or training is no guarantee of access. These factors result in it being as likely that a performer comes from a working-class mining family as from an aristocratic landowning family. Attitudes of acceptance or rejection of ‘trade union ideology’ are likely to be as wildly differing among Equity members as the General Secretary identified their levels of training, experience and career objectives, noted above.

Therefore, in conjunction with consideration below of data on performer mobilization, there is support for Fantasia’s (1988: 14) conception of class as

a dynamic phenomenon in which particular classes have no independent being, but are functions of their relationships to other classes. Thus the collective activity and mobilization of both workers and employers take place within a conflictual context and should not be considered apart from it.

This highlights the risks of reading off attitudes towards the ‘adversarial premises’ of trade union operation from colour of collar (see Badigannavar and Kelly, 2005: 519; Mills, 1951: 310). So we consider the explanatory relevance of ideology as actively contributing to ‘the constitution of social interests’ in that

the concept of ideology aims to disclose something of the relation between an utterance and its material conditions of possibility, when those conditions of possibility are viewed in the light of certain power-struggles central to the reproduction (or also, for some theories, contestation) of a whole form of social life. (Eagleton, 1991: 223)

This points to the Gramscian idea of ideology as dynamic, adaptive practice in the constitution of social interests (‘power-struggles’) that can achieve hegemony, or ascendancy, via eliciting consent. Eagleton also explores what he calls the ‘narrower’ sense of ideology, noting that the idea of legitimation forms the core of an influential definition given by Thompson: ‘the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination’ (1984, cited in Eagleton, 1991: 5). Eagleton convincingly critiques the limitations of a definitive understanding of ideology-as-legitimation. However, appositely, he also stresses the pragmatism of the political theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht: ‘Use what you can!’ (1991: 7). Legitimacy, in Eagleton’s sense of establishing a broad credibility of one’s interests, is seen as a significant influence on the issues discussed in this article.

Legitimacy is also central to Hyman’s (1974) discussion of ideology in relation to pay and the construction of occupational worth. He points out that ‘the labour market reflects the valuations imposed by the distribution of societal power’ and that these valuations encompass social values which define criteria for ‘occupational worth and prestige’ (1974: 187, 188). These values have structural origins, including legally supported institutional control over entry to the labour market, and professional status is in part maintained in this way: ‘Exclusion from socially acceptable legitimations typically constrains the pay aspirations of subordinate occupational groups’ (1974: 188). So markets for pay are, again, ‘socially contingent’ on an institutional context shaped by hegemonic values and interests (1974: 183). Hyman cautions against overstating the extent to which the labour market functions as a medium for these social valuations of significance. However, the under-employed majority of actors are regarded as of little worth as ‘real’ workers in broad labour market terms, while different values are attributed to the minority of successful actors who command high rates of pay. Success in culturally prestigious products invests them with respectability sufficient for state honours, or their stardom transforms their work into something aspirational. The same occupation thus occupies very different places in the prestige hierarchy according to market success. To begin to understand this variation requires some awareness of the historical development in Britain of acting as work, a development which itself encapsulates the explanatory relevance of ideology.

Marginality and difference

Performing, referred to still in 16th-century language by several performer interviewees as being the life of ‘vagabonds and gypsies’, has always operated on the margins of society, albeit for historically differentiated reasons. The early Christian church’s relationship with the stage has been characterized as a war, ‘particularly in the early days when the theatre represented the last entrenched camp of paganism’ (Gilder, 1931 cited in Wandor, 1986: 21); and by the 17th century and with the rise of mercantilism, those interested in religious freedom absorbed the ideas of ‘the calling’ and the virtue of ceaseless endeavour: John Locke warned that young men ‘must not divert themselves with useless arts’ (Rowbotham, 1973: 3). Weber (1930) traces the development of modern capitalism in the West as inseparable from the developing influence of Puritanism and notes that ‘The theatre was obnoxious to the Puritans’ with their rigid distinction between the divine and the flesh (1930: 169). This historical period also gives us a connection between the senses of ‘work’ and ‘labour’ and Williams (1976) says that ‘Labour had a strong medieval sense of pain and toil; work, earlier […] had also the strong sense of toil’ (1976: 335). Thus Weber’s encapsulation of the heart of the Puritan ethic, ‘the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life’ (1930: 53) could have been formulated specifically against the theatre. As the ordering of society’s economic relations in a rational capitalist form metamorphosed from their spiritual roots (light cloak to iron cage), so the religious disapproval of performing has faded to a secularized reading where the performer is not vilified but effectively forgotten, and still outside the routine construction of ‘worker’. There is irony here, as actors were among the first occupations in the world to organize themselves into guilds, in third-century Greece (Pickard-Cambridge, 1953). It is beyond the scholarship of this article to assess the unionateness of these guilds, but the later societal construction of irrelevance (actor as ‘luvvie’) is argued to have affected material aspects of labour relations in performing; shaping perceptions of work, worker and employer that have implications for a union’s efforts at representation.

Performers and pay

There is little routinely available pay information for this occupation. As Swanson et al. (2000: 200) note, official statistics do not record data on the income of the self-employed and Equity does not routinely monitor pay. At times Equity has commissioned research on pay, and statistics from one survey indicate the peculiarities of considering one’s principal occupation to be that of performer: in 1998–9, 21 per cent of actor members of Equity earned nothing from acting and 43 per cent earned under £5000. Only an unspecified proportion of the next percentage category of 8.5 per cent earned something approaching the then national average, falling into the category £10,000 to £20,000, with 6 per cent in the very broad category of £20,000 to £50,000, 3 per cent earned over £100,000 (Osborne Market Intelligence, 1999), illustrating the assessment of the International Labour Organisation:

In few occupations is the dispersion of earnings so great as in the performing arts […] performers’ incomes are lower than those of comparable occupational groups and indeed lower than full-time employees in general. (International Labour Organisation, 1992: 45, 47)

This assessment is replicated in more recent studies looking at UK, US and continental European performers’ remuneration (Caves, 2000; Creigh-Tyte and Thomas, 2001; Dean, 2008b), which find very similar patterns.

The permanent labour oversupply makes these findings simultaneously predictable and puzzling (why choose this career?). However, performer interview data show that acting – though always categorized as demanding, with long hours in often poor conditions – was frequently seen as, in the words of one performer, ‘doing something I love, it’s not really work’. A direct line can be traced here from 17th century ideology noted above, demonstrating the sustained hegemony of the utilitarian, extrinsic conception of work over the craftsmanship, intrinsic gratification conception discussed by Mills (1951: 215–28). Interview data indicated that the self-image implicit in this opinion was still widespread. It interacted with the structural realities of labour oversupply, summarized by a theatrical agent: ‘Puts the employer, the end-user as it were, in a very strong position. Because A, he’s got a lot of people that are after the job that he’s got. And B, they’ll all do it for nothing, pretty much.’ This assessment was supported by an anecdote from a performer and union member, which also gave an insight into the common strategy of enabling participation in this form of contingent work through participation in other forms of contingent work (Davies and Lindley, 2003: 16; Menger, 1999: 563): ‘I love theatre and, when I get the withdrawal symptoms, I will do a play at the Riverside [theatre] for no money … The last time I did that it actually cost me 600 quid – I realized I missed 10 days’ supply teaching.’

This represented a majority view from performers, largely seeing themselves as creative workers making career decisions based on love of the work and the affordability of doing specific jobs. A leading performer vividly expressed what has been conceptualized as ‘psychic income’ (e.g. Baines and Wheelock, 2001; Towse, 1996):

In a way it’s rather a wonderful thing that theatre isn’t paid so much because there are very few things left in life that are done for passion, by people who are doing something because they really, really believe in it. I think in a way the fact that it’s so badly paid … it means that you do it because you really want to do it.

An additional interpretation of psychic income is legitimation by rationalization. Eagleton (1991: 52) notes that oppressed groups ‘can also rationalize their situation to the point of self-deception, persuading themselves that they are not unhappy at all’. Crucially from a performer’s point of view, he goes on: ‘It is not simply a matter of the group’s beliefs being at odds here with its interests, but of its having conflicting kinds of interests’ (1991: 52, emphasis added). Menger (1999: 554), in his analysis of artistic labour markets, argues that ‘the ideology inherited from the “art-for-art’s sake” era may even reverse the meaning of success and failure’ and the attitude above was common among performers interviewed in its most general sense, although lack of pay in itself was not usually regarded as inherently positive. Nonetheless it was not an isolated opinion, as another experienced performer made plain: ‘There’s this sort of grey area that if you’re doing a play and you’re this artist, you’re sort of pretending you’re not being paid at all.’ While many performers did stress pay as price for labour, many related to payment in unorthodox ways.

Pay systems for performers vary between and within sectors of the entertainment industry, including subrep. Subrep theatre is building-based and funded principally by grants from the government-funded Arts Council and its regional outposts, as well as by self-generation of income, chiefly box-office receipts. In the subrep sector minimum terms are agreed at national level between Equity and the employer body, the Theatrical Management Association (TMA). The TMA represents approximately 350 arts organizations, including 100 subrep theatres around the UK. A journalist on the industry trade paper The Stage said in interview in relation to the subrep members of the TMA (in contrast to the commercial ‘for-profit’ theatre members): ‘most of them came up through the ranks as actors or stage managers … most used to be Equity activists.’ There is an analogy here with Blackburn’s (1967: 97) bank workers and their senior management, who had all ‘risen from the ranks’. However, in the case of performers and subrep managers this is extra-organizational, and even within banks internal promotion was not regarded by Blackburn as constructing commonality that could override fundamental conflict of interest between capital and labour (1967: 99). Nevertheless an ideology of internalism is not without substance for actors and their employers, if ‘internal’ is read as relating to the product/sector rather than specific workplace. The interconnection of theatre employers and workers has a long history and is examined more closely below.

Some subrep theatres bargain individually with actors/agents, while others offer only a ‘company wage’ where every member of the cast is paid the same amount per week. This conventionally uncommon arrangement seems from interview data to be rooted in the subrep sector’s chronic income struggles. However, both justification and acceptance of it centre explicitly on notions of equality in artistic endeavour, linked to the unitarist concept of the overriding importance of ‘the show’. The General Manager of a subrep theatre described their approach:

We pay everybody the same regardless of age, experience, part they’re playing. It’s a company rate, it’s the ethos of this place … I know quite a lot of subreps do it … We said now we’re here to create a play and everybody’s as important as everybody else. This isn’t a place you come and trumpet your ego or swan around like, you know, as the star of the piece. Everybody comes and they get paid the same.

It should be noted that in this manifestation of an egalitarian ethos, it is only the performers who are on a ‘company’ wage: the director is paid a privately negotiated fee and the technical production crew are on their regular contractual wage, as are the theatre’s administrative staff. The idea of organizational equality in service of art persists in the face of these well known contradictory facts; everyone other than the actors is paid based on what is acceptable in the other relevant labour markets (administrators, technicians, directors). Actor labour oversupply constrains engagement with these organizational realities, while employers’ moves here can be understood within a traditional conception of ideology as (partial) mystification to suppress social interests, drawing on a rationalizing strategy to legitimate inequalities and construct, in Hyman’s (1974) terms, their own hierarchy of occupational worth.

Rationalization was not confined to employers, as already noted. One experienced performer, discussing a recent job, expressed a common, implicitly contradictory, reaction to this type of wage-setting:

There were two actors who had young children and … they wanted to get home to see their kids on a Sunday … they couldn’t afford to come out for a meal … And I know ethically it’s right to have a company wage, but I felt sorry for these guys … But you know [X theatre] is just a medium rep and they haven’t got any money. (Emphasis added)

So there was awareness of a practical basis of the company wage (lack of money in subrep) but simultaneously implicit acceptance of an ideology of theatre as collaborative artistic enterprise separate from the mainstream economy. Therefore one interpretation of performers’ ambivalent attitudes is that they were effectively ‘using’ ideology as a fig leaf, a coping strategy to reconcile themselves to disadvantageous terms and conditions necessitated by underfunded employers and continuous labour oversupply. From the employer perspective, ideological power was harnessed here to achieve a financial objective to the detriment of workers. Eagleton’s (1991: 116) reading of Gramsci notes that, to avoid the necessity for coercion, hegemonic ideology must involve practical strategies in equating interests between parties (‘now we’re here to create a play and everybody’s as important as everybody else’), as ‘Once power nakedly reveals its hand, it can become an object of political contestation.’ This point will be returned to below in considering changes in Equity’s approach to subrep employers in the 2010 campaign. Here, the ways in which an equation of interests can become naturalized and then challenged are explored further.

Equity and the TMA: the relevance of history and ideology

The complex relationship between Equity and the TMA extends back to Equity’s forerunner and to the founding of the employers’ association. The TMA was formed in 1894 and its first President was Sir Henry Irving, the premier actor-manager of his day and one of the largest employers. This must have entailed careful time-management for Sir Henry as he was also President of Equity’s immediate predecessor, the Actors’ Association. Irving’s concurrent presidencies illustrated the widespread belief among actors and managers of the time that ‘they were not as other men […] They were all just a band of artists […] united in common loyalty to “the show”’ (Macleod, 1981: 73). The tone was established and in 1926 one of the Actors’ Association’s founders dismissed the General Strike with: ‘Workers … have no right to interfere with the theatrical profession’ (cited in Macleod, 1981: 163). These quintessentially unitarist perspectives, which draw on the aspirational middle-class ideology of work discussed by Blackburn, have persisted to a degree, affecting the union, members and employers.

Equity’s then General Secretary said that the politically conservative ‘Act For Equity’ grouping, which dominated the lay government of the union between 1980 and 1994, ‘wanted the union to be a non-party political professional organization as well as a union’. Another senior official dryly summarized the objective as running Equity as ‘a gentleman’s club’ (distancing actors from both workers and vagabonds). A performer summed up a parallel grassroots perception: ‘Actors don’t think of themselves as workers but as professionals. They have a vocation … like a bleeding nun or a nurse, except we’re not useful.’ This perception of actors not being ‘useful’ is closely tied to the historically achieved sense of employment as marked by observable utility and an absence of pleasure, considered above. Further, training for performers is desirable but not essential; a thorny point which has always dogged the occupation. This is especially in acquisition of the label ‘professional’ with its public legitimacy, highlighting the marginalization of this form of work and its related inability to impose a definition of occupational worth.

However, in 1994 a shift from the gentleman’s club attitude was signalled when a new political grouping, the ‘Representative Conference Group’, won a majority on Equity’s ruling lay Executive Council. This group explicitly positioned itself as ideologically different from the Act for Equity group, with a commitment to restructured internal democracy central to its campaign. In Blackburn’s (1967) terms, the group displayed a conventional trade union ideology in overtly insisting that actors and their employers had conflicting interests, necessitating delegated decision-making power to rank-and-file membership in the form of elected representatives to an annual conference. This group brought a new political impetus to union strategy and, notwithstanding the lack of a culture of industrial action and members’ complicated attitudes to pay, sought to pro-actively improve existing terms and conditions. In the words of a senior TMA negotiator, Equity started to take a ‘different and much more aggressive tack.’

Pay disputes 1997 and 2010

In 1997 the new lay leadership of the union initiated a campaign called ‘Low Pay: It’s Time to Act’ and on 1 April issued an Instruction to members not to sign subrep contracts of employment to commence work from 7 April. This was Equity’s first strike since the Employment Act 1990 neutered what had been the union’s defining characteristic, the pre-entry closed shop. No member disobeyed the Instruction and on 23 April 1997 Equity accepted a revised offer from the TMA that met the original claim. In 2010, for the first time since that strike, Equity was again mobilizing its membership to prepare for action to ‘end low pay in subrep’ (Equity, 2010a) and the development of this campaign is considered in relation to its predecessor.

The 1997 claim was for substantial wage and allowances increases on weekly minima for performers and stage management. For over a decade prior to the dispute Equity/TMA subrep negotiations had consistently produced RPI or RPI-and-a-bit increases. The data indicate that this was due to a combination of: government-imposed sector funding cuts; reluctance of Equity officials to rock the established bargaining boat with employers from a similar background; and lay government dominance by a conservative grouping whose perception of IR seemed to flow from the philosophies prevalent at Equity’s inception. They had developed a habit of peace (Cole, 1939; Hyman, 1989: 107) within a frame of reference shared, in varying ways, with members and sector employers.

There was awareness in the union that it would have to actively campaign for support from its own members. A senior official said that: ‘Actors love their work … often work for little or nothing on the Fringe or in profit-share. So the first people we had to persuade that we had a case was actors.’ This combines recognition of an essential dimension of mobilization theory in the IR context (identifying a collective injustice attributable to management: Kelly 1998), with recognition of the delicate ideological ground being trodden. A national campaign of internal communication and external publicity was started. Leading members (‘stars’) were utilized in appealing both to the wider membership and to the public (thus to state funders). Equity’s approach to leading members was to appeal to their memories of subrep as a unique training ground and produce a modern version of the original stars’ Declaration of 1931 (Equity, 1996):

We could have every single walk-on, every single small-part, even every single good working actor in membership, and if we didn’t have Sean Connery, Prunella Scales, Helen Mirren, the employers would say get stuffed … The only reason we have industrial strength is because we can say to the employers if you don’t come to an agreement with us, Helen Mirren won’t work for you. (From the minutes of the 12 November 1996 meeting of the Equity Council, obtained directly from Equity during research for the author’s MA dissertation, August 1997)

This quote directly echoes Equity’s origins, indicating contemporary stars’ recognition of this occupation’s idea of its successful workers as socially responsible. However, a full-time official rejected the ‘stars thesis’ as

A piece of nonsense. So if Sean Connery decides to leave Equity then we just put the shutters up and walk away? … If you have the 10,000 walk-ons and you have the strategy and the wherewithal to make sure those walk-ons are united … then it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.

He reiterated his view that Equity needed to develop itself more as a conventional trade union – effectively to increase its degree of unionateness and become a ‘whole-hearted trade union’ (Blackburn, 1967: 18): ‘[the closed shop] allowed us to rest on our laurels … allowed the union itself to become stale … The central issue is that Equity is a trade union and should operate and start behaving as one.’

The willingness of the new Equity Council to move away from the status quo relationship with the TMA was a deviation from the traditional ‘cooperation’ pattern identified by Walton and McKersie (1965: 190) as a product of shared social belief systems and shared bargaining experiences. As an Equity full-time official said at the time: ‘We still perceive ourselves and management as being contemporaries within a particular culture, as opposed to an effective trade union working within an industry.’ This draws on an implicit understanding of trade unions as necessarily independent in organization, ideas and objectives (unionate, in Blackburn’s terms). The ‘contemporaries’ perception was indirectly confirmed in interview by a TMA senior negotiator, in another echo of Blackburn’s ideology of internalism, who said of the dispute: ‘regrettably we found ourselves for once having to take different approaches to the way that theatres in the regions are run’ (emphasis added).

No member signed a contract to work, supporting Fosh’s (1994) finding that union members without any ideological attachment to ‘unionism’ would act collectively when they believed it was warranted. As Fantasia (1988) argues, ‘cultures of solidarity’ in industrial action are not necessarily coterminous with trade unions and therefore, in Blackburn’s terms, with trade union ideology: ‘They are neither ideas of solidarity in the abstract nor bureaucratic trade union activity, but cultural formations that arise in conflict, creating and sustaining solidarity in opposition to the dominant structure’ (1988: 18). Further, the individual fear of exposure through resistance, reported by the senior official above, was managed in an occupationally specific way by the union. A senior official felt that subrep theatre ‘represented the heart of the body of actors … who had learnt their trade there and valued what was occurring there as the most artistically respectable area of theatre in Britain’. It seems the union took the internalist ideology of shared artistic endeavour and, true to the dynamic Gramscian sense of ongoing struggle for hegemony, turned it back on the employers. Actors, drawn in to a determined and well-planned campaign, felt that their labours (almost literally of love) were undervalued by employers who should have known better; although arguably the amounts of money involved in subrep were equally important in constructing sustainable solidarity. As the General Secretary said, ‘Someone’s engagement in a [commercial theatre] panto might amount to half their annual earnings, perhaps more … The pressures on the members would be much greater than saying I won’t accept £180 a week at Billingham Rep.’

In 2010, 13 years on from the previous subrep dispute, the union (with largely different senior officials and the lay leadership still dominated by the grouping that took control in 1994) seemed to have become more overtly conscious of its ‘unionateness’, arguably stimulated by employer subversion of the sector’s implicit internalist ideology. In 2003, after decades of declining real terms funding, the government gave £25 million to subsidized theatre (Arts Council England, 2009) and according to internal Equity research this enabled theatres to come out of deficit. However, while average performer wage levels increased, the number of ‘actor weeks’ declined: fewer actors were employed on subrep contracts following the injection of money into the sector. In the 1997 dispute subrep employers were seen at the top of the union as constrained by chronic underfunding, which enabled the ‘fellow traveller’ ethos of negotiations. In 2010 that material constraint had, if not disappeared, then certainly loosened. In this effective rerun of the 1997 campaign (and before announcement of financial crisis-prompted public spending cuts) the union saw itself as more clearly opposed to subrep managers. Shared ideas between employers and workers about the importance of art and ‘the show’ had been revealed as enabling different employment outcomes and resulted in subrep pay becoming, in the sense noted above, ‘an object of political contestation’ (Eagleton, 1991: 198).

The campaign, significantly titled ‘Manifesto for Theatre’ (MFT), aimed to mobilize collective support for withdrawal of (the offer of) labour. It was explicitly constructed to cover more than the pay issue, aiming to draw on performer members’ perception of their work as having cultural significance, not simply as individual employment. The declared themes of the campaign included not only ‘An end to low wages’ but for ‘Artistic personnel to be at the heart of theatre decision-making’ (Equity, 2010a) and the discussion document produced for a members’ MFT conference framed the aims as ‘Six Ideas for Theatre’ (emphasis added) and that Equity feared ‘less in-house productions could mean a “lack of coherent artistic vision” in regional theatre’ (Equity, 2010b). It seems the implicit aim was to appeal to members’ belief, as expressed in a series of national meetings organized by the MFT campaign, that ‘art’ is important to society. It also aimed to accommodate the historically developed sense that subrep managers are ultimately on that same side. There is tension here in that, given the removal of deficits, the managers previously seen as largely driven by artistic considerations were revealed as more familiar agents of capital. While Equity’s senior leadership saw employers as arguing for no state funding cuts in a political climate where philanthropy is recommended as a new model of investment (Higgins, 2010), Equity saw its job as challenging dominant unitarist ideas to demand ‘how are you spending what you’ve got?’ Ultimately, the financial crisis was seen as closing off the mobilization strategy and a compromise pay increase was agreed in October 2010. An unremarkable ending to a pedestrian conflict of interest that illustrates Equity’s mundanity, in conjunction with the continuing ideological tensions that shape both the organization and its room for manoeuvre.

So are actors workers and are they represented by a real trade union?

Professional performers are organized by a registered trade union which negotiates their terms and conditions with employers, commonly at sectoral and national levels. While such an arrangement is clearly not necessary to define ‘real work’, it is surely sufficient. However, in addressing this straw question, Edwards’s (2006) argument that studies of work should not neglect the analytical possibilities of ideology in both expressing and challenging power has been supported. A central example was the struggle for hegemony played out in the union’s manipulation of member perceptions of the ‘art-for-art’s sake’ ideology (usually redounding to employer advantage) as part of mobilizing opposition to employers. This deployment, in both 1997 and 2010, was managed within the historically conjoined Equity-TMA relationship and demonstrated the research relevance of grasping ‘the history and structure of an existing set of relationships and teasing out why certain things are, or are not, taken for granted’ (Edwards, 2006: 575). The interaction of ideology and structure was considered in relation to the idea of what legitimately constitutes work in a permanently oversupplied labour market, thus occupational worth, thus employer/performer attitudes to pay; and in relation to Equity’s internal tensions over its ‘character’ as a real trade union. Ideological, historical and economic dimensions of IR phenomena have also enabled clearer understanding of how a union manages to operate in what appear to be exceptionally unpromising conditions and of the possibilities of representation of insecure, vulnerable workers. As noted, Heery and Abbott (2000: 155) posited that insecurity, as well as making union organization a challenge, might also encourage worker demand for protection. Actors share with other categories of insecure workers the likelihood of low/variable earnings and regular unemployment and, despite the complicating factors of vocational drive and uncertain status, they seek protection. That their representative organization has established and maintained minimum terms and mobilized member action in defence of these conditions (including utilizing the obstacle of attachment to the work itself), must be of interest in contingent employment environments more generally.

In specific terms, Equity has been on a journey to what can be recognized as Blackburn’s (1967) ‘whole-hearted’ unionateness. Collective bargaining has always been a central function, but independence from employers and willingness to take industrial action have been constrained by several factors. These include a religiously inflected conception of real work and occupational worth, the historically rooted interrelationship with sector employers and parallel ‘internalist’ ideology. The whole is informed by the challenging combination of a permanently oversupplied labour market and intense motivation to work: industrial action is asking members to refuse the deeply desired bird in the hand and, as there is no guarantee of future work, aim for statistically unlikely birds in the bush. Navigating historical, ideological and structural constraints, the union does ask for such action. Not ‘fairy people’, but recognizably a trade union attempting meaningful representation of its dependent worker members.