Survey on resilient (raked) stages in live performance
FIA and its members are committed to ensuring that performers can work in the safest conditions and that appropriate measures are taken at all times to safeguard their health while they perform or rehearse on stage. The amount of hazards that performers are potentially subject to is often underestimated. This is not only the case of big theatres with important choreographies but also, perhaps even more so, of mid-sized, small venues where performers are sometimes hired by less experienced management, with little resources to ensure their venue fully complies with all applicable health and safety regulations.
In live performance, props, smoke and haze, noise, fire and explosives, lighting, stunts, ventilation and temperature, electrical equipment are just some of the potential threats to performers that they and their employers/contractors need to properly assess, to avoid exposing themselves or others to risk.
Under the impulse of Equity in the UK, FIA has undertaken a survey of its affiliates around the world, focussing on one particular threat to the safety of performers: resilient or raked stages. Rakes can be defined as inclined floors - permanent or temporary slopes - which can be used in the course of a given production and that may either concern parts or extend to the entire surface where performers are to play, depending on how the set is designed for that production.
Standing, walking, dancing, jumping or, to put it plainly, acting on rakes does expose the performer to a potential injury, mostly via repetitive strain to specific parts of his/her body, and calls for specific precautions. Additional factors like costumes, rake surface, rake angle, time spent on rake, footwear and others can increase exponentially the amount of risk and require additional care.
FIA now wishes to collect information about this subject and draft unified guidelines, to make performers more aware of the risks generated by rakes and promote codes of conduct within the industry at all possible levels to help reduce injuries caused by rakes.
Study on industrial relations in the media sector
The European Commission has released a comprehensive study on industrial relations in the culture and media sector, covering the 15 old EU member States. The study was carried out by a contractor - the Labour Science Institute of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium – largely on the basis of interviews with the main industry players in those countries.
FIA provided valuable information on the nature and scope of its activity at international and European level and was instrumental in facilitating further interviews with its affiliates. In spite of this, interviews appear to have been mainly carried out with national trade union centers.
The research focuses on three issues:
1. The structure, organization, evolution of the culture and media sector – in its broader sense;
2. The professional relationships in the sector and the nature of collective bargaining;
3. The main players - social partners - in the sector.
Unfortunately, the final report is only available in English. However, summaries in French and other languages have also been made available. Perhaps not surprisingly, this work stumbles upon many hurdles that make it difficult to provide a comparative analysis of the state of this sector in the 15 old EU member States.
The blurry boundaries of the culture and media sector in Europe, the absence of reliable data on employment, the lack of professional status of many workers in this area, the fragmented nature of social dialogue, the different stakes in the public and the private sector, are some of the difficulties that rule out any authoritative conclusion. Indeed, drawing a clear picture of the challenges facing industrial relations in this area continues to be an extremely difficult exercise, whose outcomes must always be taken with a pinch of salt. The study, which will be complemented by a similar exercise focusing on the new EU member States, provides in our view a very rough, at times perfectible and often extremely cautious information about national systems and realities, with only very broad cross-national clues about trends and similarities. Among the latter, however, it is worthy to notice the escalation of job insecurity, an increasing demand for flexibility by employers, a rising competition, a deterioration of working conditions and the soaring number of free-lance, self-employed workers – deprived of even the most basic level of protection in many European countries.