The Washington Post: Thirty-six hours at Bonnaroo, the massive Tennessee music festival, sounds like a great way to spend a June weekend. Unless you’re working backstage without breaks, fighting exhaustion, because one of your colleagues called in sick and there’s nobody else to fill in -- like Katherine Walding did last summer.
“To say that I was potentially a danger to my crew is an understatement,” says Walding, a stagehand with a company called Crew One, which staffs rock concerts and festivals across the South. “That’s what you do if you want to get paid. It’s all you can do.”
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Having worked a gig for Live Nation, I am not surprised at all that things like this are happening, even under the best of circumstances. The gig I worked was IATSE staffed, and even then people were getting paid double overtime to fight exhaustion and keep the call (and then extended call) staffed maximally. I shudder to think the circumstances that people who work for Crew One might have to operate under. Regarding non-union crew members, I think that inexperienced workers kind of just comes with the territory. At least anecdotally, the way concert overhire people are brought on is.. less stringent, to say the least. Being able to swing a hammer is a notable asset. I feel that it really is up to the crew chiefs that run with the tour to make sure their local crew is running maximally efficiently and safely. When a giant concert comes to town and needs several hundred stagehands, there are only so many experienced card holders in that city.
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