Gathering performers’ organizations from eleven countries in the region, the meeting focused on organizing, collective bargaining and intellectual property. Representatives from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) also made important contributions to a high quality debate. In spite of a thriving cultural industry, performers in those countries almost always lack professional recognition. Their working conditions are precarious and they often have to seek other jobs to make ends meet. This, in turn, hinders their ability to train to improve their skills, encouraging the spread of amateurism and lowering quality and safety levels in production.
Despite the fact that many of these countries have ratified important ILO conventions, the right of performers to organize collectively is all too often ignored, on grounds that they are an atypical workforce and are not “employed” in the traditional sense of the word. This is clearly unacceptable, given that ILO Conventions grant all workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, irrespective of their contractual status. Self-employed status does not prevent performers in other parts of the world from setting up trade unions.
Piracy is rampant in those countries although performers do not reap the full benefits of their intellectual property rights anyway, either due to their unbalanced bargaining clout or to the fact that those rights are not properly granted / implemented by many prominent Asian countries in the first place. Due to the lack of an international treaty, audiovisual performances are still extremely vulnerable and performers denied remuneration for the extensive commercial exploitation of their work in both traditional and new media. Where those rights exist, they face challenging attempts to scale them down. This is for instance the case of private copying levies in Japan, which are being aggressively challenged by the blank tape and copying hardware industry.
Despite these challenges, the meeting – concluding a joint FIA/FIM three-year trade union awareness raising campaign in the Far East – showed encouraging signs of progress. Performers are increasingly mindful of the need to organize and are stepping up their efforts to voice their concerns. As they understand how their colleagues elsewhere in the world have improved their working conditions and their earnings, they are spurred to do the same. They feel less isolated.
In Singapore, they managed to introduce written contracts and (for the first time ever) basic H&S insurance in theatre, while in Malaysia they lobbied effectively to have their Government commit to a blueprint for the future development of the industry, expected to generate new employment for performers. Indonesian performers’ associations are looking into more efficient synergies to widen their membership and strengthen their role in the industry. The Taiwanese Performing Artist Union is seeking to enforce a close shop and boost the professional status of actors, while the Filipino Actors Guild is embarking in a new campaign to achieve recognition as a trade union and resume dialogue with film producers.
Only Thai performers lack even a basic form of representation, despite the increasing international success of their cultural industry. “We encourage Thai actors to get together and collectively resist the attempts by the industry to exploit them as cheap labour”, said FIA General Secretary Dominick Luquer, who also called on all Asian performer organizations to join the international community and benefit from the full support of trade union solidarity.