FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT’S New Deal in the 1930s recognised that the performing arts and entertainment make a vital contribution to an economy, society and culture. 

The programme sought to create work for tens of thousands of creative practitioners and bring the performing arts and entertainment to every part of the United States. 

When a New Deal administrator was asked why the government should provide jobs for unemployed artists and performers, he replied: “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
  
Equity stands in full solidarity with our sister union SAG-AFTRA as it progresses this ambition of providing decent, secure livelihoods to their thousands of members in the US today through strike action. 

Our two unions hold the same goals in common, and Equity will use every legal means possible to support their dispute. When we also come to submit our demands for better conditions to the UK entertainment industry, they will be broadly identical to those of our US siblings.
  
But here in the UK, where food banks now outnumber McDonald’s, we are hamstrung by phenomenally draconian labour laws, which severely restrict our ability to act in concert with our colleagues across the Atlantic. 

In a globalised market the producers can move freely, but UK workers remain hamstrung by restrictive national labour laws. This imbalance only benefits the bosses.   
  
That’s why the Trade Union Congress meeting in Liverpool this week must do everything it can to ensure that Labour’s new proposals for a New Deal for Working People here in the UK are implemented, to guarantee long-overdue rights to creative practitioners. 

Because, despite contributing 6 per cent to our economic output, those workers who entertain, who enlighten, and who help us to understand and express the complexities of modern life have been expected to go without the essentials for too long. 

The average Equity member earns £15,270 in the creative industry — less than half the median wage in the UK. Those in live shows often perform physically exhausting work, six days a week, at the behest of employers earning millions in profits. 

They scrape and save to pay rent, agents and utilities, working multiple poorly paid and precarious extra jobs alongside their (poorly paid and precarious) arts industry career.  

Labour’s New Deal for Working People could provide new, stronger foundations upon which we can continue to win better terms and conditions for arts workers. 

Equity members are overwhelmingly considered self-employed and would benefit hugely from the proposals included to provide self-employed workers with greater rights and protections, such as access to statutory sick pay, as well as stronger protections from blacklisting, and health and safety measures.

While Equity already negotiates collective agreements across most of theatre, film and television, we also welcome additional guarantees and protections for unions to continue to negotiate directly with employers, alongside the removal of wider trade union restrictions.    
  
Finally, recent research we produced with the University of Warwick showed how universal credit is pushing creative workers into financial hardship, by applying an obscure rule known as the minimum income floor, which dramatically reduces the amount of support that the self-employed are eligible for. 

Half of our members that had been subject to this rule has been left unable to pay bills, 5 per cent had been forced to leave their home, including one person who was sleeping in their car when interviewed for the research. 

We must see the minimum income floor scrapped under Labour’s proposal to replace universal credit. Equity is tabling a motion at Congress to seek our union comrades’ backing for pursuing this vital change.

Labour’s New Deal for Working People could be a major step forward in providing the basic rights and security that performing artists and creatives deserve. 

As UK film and TV production continues to increase, the New Deal would ensure that workers can speak with one voice on both sides of the Atlantic. 

After 13 years of Conservative government, these measures are sadly necessary to meet that simple aspiration from the 1930s that “they’ve got to eat just like other people.”

Paul W Fleming is general secretary of Equity.