Actors Equity Association: Hostile Work Environment

You hear the stories about the DMV worker asked to remove an American Flag from their cubicle, and the secretary forced to not have a bible on her desk, or the fireman who can’t have a Hooters calendar up at the firehouse. They all make the headlines and they contribute to the somewhat sanitized work environments now pretty standard in corporate America due to H.R. weenies scared of the ever-annoying “Hostile Work Environment” law suit.

It brings to mind the day I had to meet at the LA Actors Equity Association (AEA) offices to negotiate some special provisions for a show I was hired to manage. AEA is the union for stage actors and for all you Hollywood types who just deal with SAG, consider yourself lucky that at least you deal with a PROFESSIONAL operation.

To get to the conference room at the AEA office, I walked down the length of their front offices with a pool of desks on the left and a wall full of office doors down the right side of the corridor. The offices were for various representatives hired to enforce different contracts based on size of theatre and geographic location this side of the Mississippi.

As I walked, I noticed that on practically every other office on the right was a scotch-taped political cartoon. And this wasn’t your benign leftist “Doonesbury” or Jules Pfeiffer scribble. No, these were raw, in your face; George Bush is an evil, stupid chimp kind of cartoons. The standard, “Bush lied, people died”, kind of stuff and Dick Cheney is Darth Vader/United States of Haliburton kind of stuff.

What does it say about a workplace where the people in middle management feels completely comfortable posting these things for all the other employees, not to mention guests such as myself, to see?

So, I finish my meeting and I win a few items on my wish list and my friend and adversary on the other side of the table leans in and says “You know, there’s going to be a job opening here soon, and we’d really like to bring in some people from the producer’s side to help us in some organizing efforts and to help re-fashion some of the contracts. We think it would do us some good to have someone from the producers’ perspective on our team.”

I actually commended him on the idea and agreed that it would do them a lot of good to add that perspective, but I didn’t think this was the job for me.

If the entertainment industry leans left, then the theatre world is left of left. And if theatre is left of left, then the theatre actor’s UNION is so far left they consider Dennis Kucinich the reasonable alternative to Ralph Nader.

As I was walking back out to the front door, I stopped in to schmooze with the Western Region Director, and I casually asked “Does anyone ever complain about the cartoons on the doors down the corridor here?” “No, why?” he asked. Why, indeed.

I wonder if I should have taken the job just so I could have handed them a law suit six months later.

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