COVID, Cameras, & ContractsHow the Performing Arts' Shift to Streaming in the COVID-19 Pandemic Altered Standard Union Agreements
by Ryan Dumas
Master of Arts Management '22 // Carnegie Mellon 93-830 Disruptive Technology in Arts Enterprises Note 1: Citations are provided via hyperlink (bolded and underlined text) instead of footnotes. Complete bibliography provided on final page. Note 2: Images, when not already cited, contain link to source in caption. Note 3: All pages are accessible via navigation bar atop site, or by clicking button for next section at bottom of each page. Image Source: https://helloendless.com/make-self-contract-personal-goals/ |
INTRODUCTION
Unions, and their influence on the ideals of American working life, are at the root of modern American labor history and the fight for workers’ rights. Offering leadership, community, connection, and collective bargaining power, a union is “an organization of workers dedicated to protecting members' interests and improving wages, hours and working conditions for all.” Originally conceptualized in repose to the Industrial Revolutions and the need for strong protections against overwork and dangerous working conditions, today America’s unions are powerful organizations with the power to bargain on behalf of their members with their employers, in order to make sure their constituents are not taken advantage of. However, unions are also a business at their core, who make money off of member dues and attract power through gaining members in different sectors. What happens, then, when there is no work? What happens when the work changes, and a union’s agreements are no longer relevant?
While once a theoretical question, most performing arts unions have faced this exact struggle in the last year as the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to almost all arts work, especially in the performing arts where work is meant to happen in person in front of a live audience. In creatively trying to find ways to keep their art forms alive and institutions solvent, many companies turned to streaming to fill the void: both streaming works originally intended to be performed live/staged, or to replace a season of live and/or staged work. This, in turn, affected the union agreements that governed these productions. Many union agreements with producers and producing organizations were based off the known standards of production in the performing arts: mainly, that they were live. Moving to streaming led to questions of union sovereignty, rights to work, rights over distribution of image, and more. Through comparison of union contracts before, during, and emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergence of streaming into the performing arts, especially utilizing case studies as reference, it can be seen that unions and their standard contracts/agreements are in a state of flux, representative of the industry as a whole.
In short: COVID-19 and the emergence of streaming forced unions to reconsider what benefits they provide to their members in the workplace, in order to explicitly include them in new agreements. These new agreements also led to union considerations of what their actual most important benefits are, in order to determine which union has sovereignty over an instance of streaming. |