I wouldn't disagree with Alan's attitudes towards Council. But where I think there *is* hope for the future is simply this: most of the members of Council are no longer young - the majority of them have not even plied their trade significantly in the days since the closed shop was lost; their whole attitude towards the profession has been conditioned by ideologies born of yesterday's marketplace. The hope that we have is that, in a quarter decade's time, we will have moved on. A new generation of actors is finally gaining self-awareness: sad to say, they have almost uniformly had to deal with the market circumstances that dictated their wages have been cut across the board, that they have never been offered the opportunity, let alone the guarantee, of working in rep, that their ownership of the Equity card has meant less and less to them collectively, and only something to them individually. They have lost a sense that their profession is consistent, that they will invariably be treated by their employers with professionalism and dignity, and many of them have, at one time or another, had to take on work for exiguous rates or no pay at all.
After 20 years of Equity habitually telling its membership that these experiences are 'illegitimate' and 'anomalous', the union is finally beginning to wake up to the fact that there is a lot of disaffection festering at the grass roots, regardless of that attitude. And this is, in part, because it can't afford to ignore these issues anymore: they are the defining life experiences for most 'jobbing actors' working in the UK in the 21st century, just as, once upon a time, treating a drama school as a finishing school, expecting a guaranteed role in a rep upon graduation, understanding the fringe to be a specialist arena for experimentalists, and seeing working on advertisements as nothing short of 'selling out' defined the experiences of generations of actors gone by. The essential trouble with Council is that too many people on it think like it's 1971, or even 1961 (!), not 2011. The greatest hope we have is that, over the next few years, more actors born of generations to whom the 'closed shop' is only a fabled memory, and whose experience of the industry is akin to our own, will stand for Equity election and be allowed to have a voice in policy - and that they will push forward the types of reforms we would wish to see made.
This is why it *is* so acutely important to vote - only 7% of the membership in fact took the time to vote in the most recent elections. Alan is quite right that knowing nothing about the candidates doesn't help your vote - but that doesn't mean that you cannot sense when a policy seems to accord well with grass roots principles and when it doesn't. For instance, Karina of the Young Members Committee is standing for election to the General Council this time around: she is much closer to an awareness of what it means to have to suffer e.g. lo/no pay conditions than I suspect large numbers of those standing are.
Admitedly, this is a two way street. Although it would be no guarantee that votes would come flooding in, I am sure that more members would be taking time to give a decent feedback to Equity if they felt Equity was taking more time to address their concerns in the first place. This is why there also needs to be a massive improvement in the direction of informing members more accurately of what concerns them, making the magazine a true mouthpiece for the membership and not a glorified puff piece, getting what members need easily accessible on the website and so on. Indeed, I am beginning to think that it is actually more imperative that Equity sets its own house in order - and starts to reintegrate the union with the membership - than that it campaigns against external issues, at least in the first instance!
