Rebecca Naomi Jones says she’s made a joke of asking, “Remember when I used to be an actress?” She was in Los Angeles working on a television miniseries when COVID-19 brought mandatory quarantine and an end to most performing arts. Now she has no idea when or even if filming will restart.
Theaters and concert halls have stood empty for nearly half a year. And performing artists are facing the full brunt of the pandemic’s economic crisis.
Organizing may not just be the right way forward for artists under quarantine, but the only way forward.
Some performers were able to get Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. Some have had to live off their savings. Many have been forced to leave the profession, which was already effectively part of the gig economy and fraught with precarity.
“Some of my friends were able to move back home to be with their families,” says Dorian Wallace, a composer and piano accompanist for the Martha Graham Company. “I know some people who did DoorDash and UberEats to make ends meet. The most devastating [case] is a really good friend of mine. She’s a French horn player on Broadway, and she couldn’t get an interview at Trader Joe’s.”
Wallace says he has “seen a lot of people leave the city probably for good because they were already on the fringes of surviving, and this pushed it so they literally cannot be here anymore.”
Remote work for performing artists, if it pays anything at all, is an erratic source of income. Events are mostly tip-based. Audiences can choose to give, or not, as a form of charity.
“One week I would make $250 dollars, and the next week I would make $20,” says Wallace of doing piano accompaniment for Instagram ballet classes in exchange for audience donations.
“A couple of times I got paid, and a couple of times I didn’t,” says Jones, referring to the podcasts and livestreams she’s participated in. “The monetary amount is more like a gesture than a solid paycheck.”
Artists who worked under union contracts have generally been able to weather the pandemic more securely. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) has been especially supportive of its members throughout the pandemic.
“Our union is made up of mostly musicians, so I feel that they really understand the musician’s life and are trying to do the best they can to take care of us,” says Paul Loesel, a keyboardist and substitute conductor for the Broadway production of Wicked. “They’re doing everything possible to keep most of us on a health plan. The union has really been there for us.”
AFM represents musicians in film, Broadway, and orchestral music. Loesel is confident his union will ensure that he still has his job when his show returns, whenever that may be.
“I’m a member of the musician’s union, and I’m going to remain a member,” says Marc Ribot, a guitarist and frequent collaborator with Tom Waits. “When I’ve worked under contract with a major label it’s been wonderful, and I feel I’ve been treated fairly. The union for Broadway players is a model of union democracy, but it needs to be said that the unions are dominated by the core constituencies whose contracts have existed since the late 1940s: symphonic musicians, Broadway, major labels, major film.”
Like so many unions undermined by neoliberal restructuring, over the last four decades, performance unions have shifted much of their energy from organizing to shoring up their gains. Meanwhile, membership has shrunk. Today these last strongholds of unionized performers are hunkered down, waiting for the market to reopen.
The performers doing on-the-ground organizing during the pandemic are working with alternate organizing models, outside of traditional union structures. Lacking work, more and more artists are joining these collectives to help each other through dire times.
Ribot, who sits on the steering committee of the Musician Workers Alliance, a worker center for independent musicians, sees the pandemic as a time to get organized.
“Right now it looks bad,” he says. “Live gigs are shut down, and the record industry is on the ropes because of digital exploitation, and it’s even more on the ropes now because we can’t tour, so we’re facing some hard shit. But we’re spending our down time organizing. As this progresses, indie musicians and DJs are going to have an organized voice for the first time, and we’re going to use it, and we’re not going to shut up.”
Wallace runs the New Music Organizing Caucus, a group of musicians who make contemporary music. He is also the musician outreach coordinator for Sing in Solidarity, a socialist music collective and community choir run by members of Democratic Socialists of America.
“People are starting to shift a little bit more radically, because the argument was always how do we make it work in a capitalist system, and people are slowly realizing you can’t,” Wallace says. “You can’t do any performance art music and make any kind of sustainable model within capitalism.”
Live shows and filming are shut down for the foreseeable future. Remote work doesn’t translate for performing artists into real income. Organizing, therefore, may not just be the right way forward for artists under quarantine, but the only way forward.
Mobilizing rank and file caucuses, like the New Music Organizing Caucus, within the major performance unions, presents a feasible path forward for artist-organizers. In recent years, highly mobilized performance union caucuses have made major gains.
In 2016, the #FairWageOnstage movement worked with Actors’ Equity to negotiate a new contract with off-Broadway theaters. It began as a caucus inside the union that grew to be thousands of members in size. Organizers sat on union committees, insisting that the union push for stronger, better contracts. When the union balked, their highly mobilized caucus applied pressure from outside through a vast social media campaign. The movement wound up winning pay increases of up to 92 percent from off-Broadway theaters.
And while venues are shut down, the rank and file are ripe for mobilization. This requires a willingness to work with often-recalcitrant union leadership and within existing bureaucratic union models. Doing so while simultaneously maintaining wide-scale militant radicalism is a tall order—one that requires commitment from members.
The pandemic is driving many artists to the edge, but that does not guarantee a widespread awakening of class consciousness. Deep and sustained organizing is needed. A fierce organizing effort in which performers join unions en masse and make those unions do what they are supposed to do, begins, first of all, with performers thinking of themselves as workers and their craft as work.
“A labor of love is still labor,” says Nick Westrate, actor and organizer with Fair Wage Onstage. “And people think because you love it, you’ll do it for nothing. There’s this idea that actors are always so grateful to even be there, and it’s a mentality that we all have taken in.”
The material and psychological barriers to organizing artists, some of the most atomized and individualistic of workers, are immense. The benefits, however, could be incalculable. If artists can be organized—and the power of the performance unions in the midcentury shows us that they absolutely can be—there is no industry that is impervious to collective action. Performers were the original gig workers, after all.
“We were on the cutting edge of new forms of exploitation,” Ribot says. “I really believe that if we can create models of organizing that work for musicians, then we’ll really have something that will be applicable in many other situations. We’re the ones who made getting fucked over cool, and if we organize, we can make that cool, too.”