Nearly a hundred years ago the practitioners of a trade that had traditionally been regarded as barely a step above prostitution formed a union.
The growing resentment of the men and women of the legitimate stage towards the conditions under which they were employed eventually found institutional expression in the founding of the Actors’ Equity Association (AEA) in 1913. But it was not until 1919—by which time it had become abundantly clear that the producing managers had no intention of yielding any of their control over the terms under which actors were employed—that its members voted to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
~ "All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker"
I have never been a member of Actors' Equity, but I was for a time a non-union actor with paying gigs. And in the early 1980s I went on strike. Twice.
They were quiet little strikes, spur-of-the-moment affairs — no picket lines; no publicity. We weren't consciously standing up for any ideological principle; we shouted no slogans about the dignity due working people. The first strike was because we were overworked; the second, because we hadn't been paid. But these private acts of collective desperation — for such they were — made very real for me the conflict between labor and capital.
Historically, the problem that has confronted actors whenever they have engaged in struggles for workplace justice is that acting, whether on stage or in front of a movie camera, is rarely perceived as work.
In late 1981 I was employed in the "illegitimate" theatre, in a vaudeville show; and it was very hard work indeed. (If you've never sat near the front of a theater during a live performance, let me just point out that performers sweat — with good reason.)
[P]erformance is an unusual commodity in that it is a labor process exhibited before and consumed by an audience. As the key component in this process, the actor is both the producer of the commodity and its embodiment. Yet the system of production in the commercial entertainment industry masks this duality. In transforming actors into fetishized objects of consumption, it detaches them from the industrial workplace and defines their calling almost entirely in terms of the rewards that accrue to it, with the consequence that their collective grievances have rarely elicited much in the way of public sympathy.
Sympathize with this: we were doing two shows a day, six days a week (in addition to frequent rehearsals). Tiring, but doable. (Broadway actors commonly perform eight shows during a six-day week.) Then our producer presented us with a new schedule: first three, and then four performances a day — at noon, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm (with no addition to our small paychecks). We grumbled, but somehow shuffled our weary way through the three-show phase.
On the first four-show day, we gave a pretty ragged noon performance to an audience of about ten or twelve people. As that very long day progressed, the backstage whispers got urgent (and less whispered). Something had to be done.
By midnight, as we finally left the theater, we were nearly catatonic, and a good deal beyond desperate. Some among us were initially frightened, others angry, but, ultimately, all of us were united. So a group of us sat up for hours drafting a document airing our grievances, putting management on notice that we would no longer submit to a schedule that required of us a fourteen-hour workday (with eight of those hours actually on stage). We went on strike.
Long story short (leaving out quite a lot), after some contentious negotiations the next morning the producer agreed to restore the three-per-day schedule. (We'd asked for a return to the initial two-per-day, but a spirit of compromise prevailed.) It's significant that among our complaints, the one that hit home for him was "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" inherent in nearly empty houses. He was by no means an evil capitalist, just a guy trying to get the most out of his business. But he'd badly misunderstood both his market and his employees.
Within a few months I found myself in another show with a very different producer. This time the issue was money. By the end of the run — in fact, on the night of our final show — we had yet to be paid, despite having written contracts. Now, a few of us were veterans of that previous strike, which gave us some much-needed experience and courage. Knowing that if we struck before the performance that night's show would simply be cancelled, we came up with a plan to put management over a barrel: do the first act, then go on strike at intermission.
It worked, after a fashion. The producer, in high dudgeon, offered excuses, railed at us in rather offensive language and generally refused to listen. The accountant had a cooler head, however: he quickly talked the producer down, then went to the box office, grabbed some of the cash on hand and distributed it to us on the spot, with a promise for more once the books had been closed. It worked out to about $50 each, and was the entire payment any of us ever received for three weeks of performance (and several more of rehearsal). We then performed the rest of the show.
That producer walked away with thousands (she should have walked away in handcuffs). As for me, I walked away with an insignificant $50, but also with some small measure of dignity; and, most importantly, a real-life lesson in the value of organized labor. It was certainly no 1919, but because it happened to me, "my" strikes in 1981-82 had a profoundly transformative effect in ways that long-ago historical events, however important, never could.