Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Backstage theatre workers 'pushed to breaking point due to lack of work-life balance'
News | The Stage: Backstage theatre workers are being “pushed to breaking point” due to a lack of work-life balance, with a “regular expectation to work 15-hour days”, industry bodies have warned.
Unions BECTU and Equity and professional associations for stage managers and lighting and sound practitioners have argued that “excessively long working hours” are leading to “burnout and serious mental health issues”.
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11 comments:
This is a very sad yet prevalent article to read solely because of the issue that it deals.
Overworking is an issue that has both physical and mental repercussions that together can adversely affect the life of the concerned.
Theater, especially during the build and design processes is a hard job. A lot of work needs to be completed in a limited time period. But often that is something that is achieved at cost of the workers, which is not the right way.
Work needs to be done but in a way where the end result can be enjoyed by everyone and not just by a few people, where the rest of the people are too tired to realize and relish their hard work.
This is the reason why a limit on working hours needs to be implemented instantly and applied so that workers are not suffering with the mental and physical repercussions of over working.
I briefly glanced at the article about Tait towers earlier, and it made me curious to see what their demographic was. I discovered through this googling countless people complaining about how Tait has unrealistic expectations about working hours and work life balance. I saw several people claiming that they watched marriages get destroyed by the required overtime hours, and if you aren't willing to do that then you get fired. These employee testimonials painted Tait in a much different light than we had previously been lead to believe. I think that it's an unfortunate truth that too much of the industry is like this. Take our own school for example. Most professional theaters have at least one dark day a week. We are led to believe that we should have Sunday off, but we all know that that rarely happens. If, as 18 year olds, we can't expect to have a consistent day off to take care of ourselves every week, then how can we start understanding what appropriate working standards would be when we enter the workforce. It's time for these companies to stop treating people as disposable, and CMU Drama should be spending a significant amount of time not only cementing that we have a right to breathe, but also walking the walk, rather than making empty promises. This is an industry wide change that needs to happen, or life in theater is unsustainable.
Why am I not surprised by this article? Why am I not surprised that people are being overworked? Why can’t there just be one more day within the schedule to provide lighting programmers with more time? I honestly am so done with the idea that people need to be overworked to get the show up. Realistically, people can live more balanced lives and the show will still go on. The concept that the show is superior to human lives and a positive work/life balance is bullshit. Also the fact that people also are really not being paid for their overtime, is sadly, not surprising. We need to change the way the world is currently working to give people more money and let people have a better balance of work and home life. I love that the fault of many of these problems is “the nature of the industry.” Why are we okay with things as they are?
I wasn’t surprised to read any of this, but I am a bit discouraged. As a stage hand/technician/theater person in general, I love to work, I know a lot of us are workaholics in some way shape or form, but it’s discouraging that that is the expectation. It’s as if our love for our work is being brutally taken advantage of for labor at the expense of our mental and physical health, and that’s not really a career to look forward to. At every turn we are faced with reasons that working in this industry is difficult, unfair, or unhealthy, and time and time again we justify those things with “but I love it,” so when does loving your work stop being enough? We get a taste of that heavy work load at CMU, School of Drama students burn out left and right, my classes start at 8:30 or 9 and crew ends at 10:30, sometimes every day of the week, but we keep going because it feels productive, and maybe once we graduate, we’ll be in control of our hours and our work-life balance, but by the sound of it that isn’t the case. So, are we all doomed to work 12/15-hour days for the rest of our lives? Is theater really this machine that’s built to “just get the show up?” and why can’t we seem to get a show up (at any level, high school to Broadway) without sacrificing the health of our labor?
While the contents of this article is actually pretty good, the headline actually offends me. I think that this headline places blame for a “poor work-life balance,” when really the blame should be placed on the people who demand that they work those ridiculous hours. Fifteen hours six days a week is an absurd request to make of a person, yet it is standard in theatre. The fact that wage stagnation in this country has become more and more of an issue over the past years has not helped either. As not only have hours become worse, but so has pay as well. This situation is a long term lose-lose situation. Workers become more and more tired, and thus become less and less productive with more and more time. This is a systematic problem, that does not start or end with theatre, but we can act in an attempt to make it better for everyone.
I found this article to be very interesting because this is a topic that I am often asked about. I have never found that I am working too much to experience burnout or physical drawbacks. I think this is mostly a sign that the places that I have worked at have been aware of people’s capabilities and ability to work a certain amount. I honestly think the title of this article is a bit misleading; this issue is not about workers’ abilities to balance work and life, as though it was something that could be solved with some lifestyle changes. This is more of an issue of theaters trying to cut costs and pushing their workers harder than the workers can actually handle. Theater is not known for how high-paying it is and this is evidently part of the problem. I doubt that there is an easy solution to this problem but this is something that really needs to be addressed; employers should not be allowed to demand so much of their employees.
My introduction to this article comes from a wellness panel I attended during USSIT this week. It pulled some quotes from the article and used it to discuss how we are in an industry that is prone to over-working it’s technicians and the article was what I expected it would be. Though I was expecting it to be more of a touring sort of lifestyle and was surprised it mentioned regional theatres. I think we’re all set up to expect these sort of long hours, on a usual day I spend about 13 hours at least on campus (though on T, TH I spend about 2 of these hours at Pitt). This of course doesn’t include weekend calls and any additional work that I complete once I get home. In some respects I try to minimize my complaints because I am aware that I made the choice to be here and doing this but we also want to have an industry that is sustainable and healthy to make a career in. I think the industry expectations need to change but I also think trying to work smarter and not harder and preparedness could be individual contributions being made to enhance the efficiency of the processes we have to go through.
These articles seem to pop up constantly no matter where you look in the entertainment/theatre industry we have a problem and although it is being acknowledge it isn't being addressed to the fullest extent quite yet. And it goes industry wide there is a culture and an Idea that we will work until the job is done or we will work until it is the absolutely best thing we can physically or mentally create. This often time means pushing our hours and our work capacities to the fullest extent. I often seem myself doing this with school where I will spend 12-13 hours at school in a given day and leave myself little to no time to do my outside work or even homework upon occasion. There is an industry wide issue with expectations still and with working conditions just saying you've gotta get it done or it sucks but its whatcha got to do isn't an acceptable answer anymore and we need to be working to find a better solution.
This is obviously a problem. Unfortunately, I don’t know that there is a viable solution. Theatre requires a lot of work to produce the product, and in most cases, it’s not a very profitable industry. To pay workers more, the financial burden of those pay raises would fall either on theaters, which operate on fairly slim margins, donors, who are already squeezed for every last dime, or audiences, which likely would not tolerate industry wide ticket price hikes. There’s not really anywhere the system can be stretched to allow for better working conditions without combining more jobs into one with technology to make productivity more efficient. And even that is likely not a satisfactory solution, because most people that work in theatre do so because they love the work and the industry, and eliminating jobs to make the rest of them better would mean fewer opportunities for all the people that love to be involved in theatre.
Like everyone is saying, this article is sad yet not surprising and popping up everywhere. I think that people also need to think about how this article pops up in every industry. My mother is in corporate America and she pulls a fifteen-hour day several days a week. I think this article speaks to a greater American culture of being workaholics. I remember last year commenting on an article about how actors in London are getting better paternity and maternity leave. I think this article highlights issues of burn common in the theatre that is different from other industries in that we don’t have a standard five day work week. In theatre, the standard is a six-day workweek with the other day sometimes filled with a second job. This article also highlighted that people are working sixty-hour weeks. This is a problem not just in theatre but everywhere and I wonder what is a good way to stop this. I know people who have been told by their doctors that can’t work because of fatigue but this isn’t something can stop a culture of workaholics. I wonder if it is a mindset that overachievers are better or rather a different mindset?
I agree with the general opinion of the comments- this article was depressing but not surprising. We tend to take our overloaded schedules for granted, and then are surprised when burnout occurs. I was reading an article earlier about a theater that was trying to keep a work schedule and policies that would allow their workers to be able to have a family and spend time with them, and it’s scary that something like that is seen as a radical and revolutionary idea. Yes, it is physically and mentally possible to work long days 6 days a week, but expecting workers to maintain that their whole lives becomes totally unreasonable. I often see the issue framed as “she’s a workaholic!” or “he doesn’t know how to maintain a work-life balance” when the issue is less about the workers themselves and more about the expectations being placed on them by the industry and their venue. What we do is important, but not important enough to systematically ruin the health of everyone entering the workforce, and a love for what you do can really only take you so far.
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