IN December of last year, Equity’s membership agreed a new rulebook by referendum.

With 76 per cent voting in favour, in the highest-turned-out referendum in over a decade, the membership endorsed a modern, transparent rulebook — and as part of it: a reformed conference.

This conference is unlike any other we’ve held since our first in 1994. We have a dynamic fringe hearing debate and discussion on everything from climate change, the attacks on drag artists, resources for women members, and the impact of new anti-trade union laws.

The motions are overwhelmingly industrial and outward-facing; after a year which has seen the exponential rise of artificial intelligence, more austerity from Arts Councils across Britain, and more revelations about harassment in our industries, members are seeking to build a union able to tackle these threats head on.

Despite this new injection of energy, more than one representative has already commented on the similarities of the issues of 2023 to the issues of 1994.

Indeed, at that conference almost 30 years ago, our key speaker was Michael Grade, discussing the threats to Channel 4 — in 2022 the union mounted a campaign to save the public broadcaster from sale and asset-stripping.

Low pay, precarity and attacks on marginalised artists are certainly nothing new.

Arts funding has decreased under successive governments year on year. Since 2005 central arts funding in England alone has declined by around a third in real terms.

What is new however is the scale of the union’s wins in 2022 — and that really is a theme of our conference.

Ten per cent pay rises in independent theatre, plans to remove the antiquated six-day week in rehearsals for theatre artists, modernising accommodation away from home for those touring, victory at Channel 4, removing some of the most damaging proposals around copyright reform, doubling our collective agreements in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The battles came thick and fast from when we left our conference in Leeds last May — on the last day we’d rallied at a dance company threatening to put dancers on £100 a month; by the time representatives were home, the company had backtracked.

There is no doubt that these wins have only come from the energised, loud trade union movement which is emerging from the pandemic.

Equity members may have held solidarity galas for miners in the 1990s, but there’s something particularly thrilling about being alongside colleagues from the UCU, CWU, RMT, Unite, FBU, PCS, NEU and others.

It’s impossible to remember a time when so many unions were winning, not just pay and conditions but the innate dignity in realising the collective power of our working-class movement.

On the eve of conference, my message to the movement is look to Equity. A union whose members’ modal age is 28, density is at least 60 per cent (almost 90 per cent on the West End of London), and which has made sectoral collective bargaining modern, relevant and powerful.

Look to us and our organising a young, diverse, self-employed workforce, at the heart of the British economy, help us as working people, and learn from the big wins we’ve made this last year.

Why look to us? Because we’ve looked to you. The idea that Equity members would be speaking about their shared struggles with members of the BFAWU and the GMB was implausible even five years ago.

Our members have often been convinced that true liberation comes from being an artist, and that that is separate from being a working person.

The modern movement has shifted that bosses’ narrative for the better: Equity members are as proud to be working people and trade unionists as they are to be artists.

That’s why we have our motto, as relevant in 2023 as in 1994: to all artists good work; to all workers good art; to all people: Equity.