Just to add to what I was commenting on earlier (it was late, and I was tired) - the union restructuring...
I think this development is an especially interesting - and (potentially) far reaching - one. As I understand things (having sat on an Equity Committee for the past year or so), Equity initially decided that, during this period of economic retrenchment, the current system of Equity Committee representation (whereby specialist committees have multiplied over the years in order to defend special interest areas and influence Council policy for the benefit of the membership) was felt to have become cumbersome, unwieldy and costly to maintain. Whether the latter point is valid is an open question (although it was Equity's initial justification for seeking to reform internal structure) - what *is* certain is that many of these Committees were/are not serving member interests especially effectively. Equity has also implemented (to a degree) a reformation of the way in which the Council is constituted - mainly because it was held that the Council too is an unwieldy body with too many seats on it being held as sinecures (the number of seats has lessened, and under new rules, more are allocated for specific interest groupings, I believe).
What surprised me, in honesty, when I discussed it with my colleagues who sit on my own Committee (soon to be disbanded - Independent Theatre Arts - which was for some months under the Chairmanship of Andrew Macbean) - is the fact that ITAC was actually one of the few committees I could ever have been elected to, because the vast majority of committees are specific interest only, and actors cannot be elected to them. This struck me as somewhat revelatory at the time: certainly, the committees must have originated in order to support the interests of groups under-represented within what primarily began as an actor's union - directors, choreographers, fight directors and the like - but now it appeared to me as if the boot was on the other foot: a union in existence where, notwithstanding the massive difficulties most members of our profession are having to cope with daily, allowed for virtually no actor led representation at specialist committee level which might influence policy - suggesting only that actors would have to make do with deciding policy at branch meetings.
What seems important about the new restructuring rules is that committees are being 'merged' into much broader based representations: Stage, Screen etc. This may raise other issues: I am not sure whether there is still some dispute over how many seats may be allocated on any given committee to members of our particular profession, for instance. A putative 'Stage' Committee, for instance, might have seats for directors, choreographers, technical stage crew, and so on as well as actors, but at least there *will* be seats for actors! There is also, of course, an issue that surrounds which actors get elected to said seats, and whether or not they will necessarily agree on priorities; from the perspective of most jobbing actors, for instance, it could be maintained that West End stalwarts will find it hard to respond to the issues that we may wish to see contested - low rates of pay, profit share and so on. Equity maintain that it will be these kinds of issues that make future elections more fiercely contested than they have been in the recent past: this is something the union welcomes, not least because it may do something to engage the membership more dramatically. We will have to see.
But all of these moves do seem to indicate that something is changing as regards Equity's response to the needs of the current industry. That there will be a Screen Committee, for instance, with a specific remit to debate and set policy relevant to the union's relationship with film schools, commercial agencies, television production companies, and Internet based providers seems remarkable, given that I don't think the union has ever had such a specifically dedicated body of this type in place before. Is it all too little, too late? A superficial changing of the guard? Or does it promise a brave new approach to the way the union actually defends actor rights in the 21st century? I don't know, and nor, before the event, does anyone else. What I do think is true is that we shouldn't be complacent about the coming changes: when these restructured forms begin to emerge (which will be in the next year or two), it will be up to us to try and ensure that something *will* alter for the better in our relationship to the union, because this is the best opportunity we have had in years to try and alter the way Equity fundamentally serves its purpose.
Watch this space!
