What show workers ask for – Annalisa Camilli

In Piazza del Popolo on April 17, thousands of show business workers shouted: “Government, can you see us now?”, Bringing to the square a thousand trunks in which the props are usually collected. The event was organized by several acronyms six months after the first flash mob of the same type, which took place in Milan.

In the same hours of the demonstration in Piazza del Popolo, just as the Draghi government announced the reopening at the end of April, the Globe Theater in Rome was occupied, an outdoor structure in the heart of Villa Borghese, in which the workers of the show organized five days of meetings and discussions in which thousands of people took part, to ask the government to take on the costs of more than a year of closing theaters, cinemas, shows and live concerts, but also to change its approach to culture, in a year that showed all the structural problems of the cultural content production system: from the extreme precariousness of show business workers to the lack of funding and long-term projects. “To us eyes, please” was written on the banner unrolled on the stage of the Roman theater, paraphrasing an old show by Gigi Proietti, creator and director of the Globe.

Ilenia Caleo, actress, author and researcher at the University of Venice, was among the promoters of the Roman occupation, which lasted only five days because “we do not want to waste all our energies in protest, it seems to us that even the struggle must be sustainable in this pandemic situation and we wanted not only to ask for subsidies and assistance from the government, but above all to make proposals, to imagine how the future of this sector could be starting from this crisis ”. Caleo explains that the mobilizations have been going on for a year: “In recent weeks in France a hundred theaters have been occupied, even if the French situation is very different. Just as two theaters in Naples and Milan have been occupied ”.

Entertainment workers chose to occupy the Globe also for the awareness that indoor spaces are more dangerous for contagion: “We chose the Globe because it seemed to us that it protected us a little more, this year of pandemic has changed us and we cannot ignore that even manifesting and seeing each other to discuss can represent a danger, manifesting becomes almost a paradoxical action: bodies are called together, which then cannot be close to each other. But at the same time we wanted to give the idea that we would not be closed between ourselves to argue. We do not want our claims to be only those of our category, we also want to open ourselves to other sectors that share our problems and to the city in general. The Globe is an open space that has allowed us all this. The name, Globe, already makes one think of the world: the idea was to remake the world, with the slogan ‘Remake the globe’ ”.

The issues that emerged from the assembly were different: “The covid has plunged us into an extreme emergency, but it has brought out the contradictions of a sector in which work is extremely precarious, intermittent, autonomous, illegal, submerged, with a thousand definitions. Suffice it to say that it is subject to seven different types of contracts. This means that it is possible to work in the same environment with different rights. The contracts are about to expire and from this point of view there are specific union demands, in a sector that is however still very little unionized ”. Another request is a basic income of continuity, as is the case for example in France with the statute of intermittence.

“The idea is in general, beyond the health emergency, to think about a reform of self-employment and precarious work for culture and art workers”, continues Caleo. In other words, workers ask that it be possible to access a form of income in the moments of pause, which beyond the pandemic are structural for the type of work. “We imagine intermittent income as extendable to other categories of temporary workers in other sectors as well, we think of publishing, research, communication. In France, intermittent income was established after the war precisely to protect live entertainment workers, who are precisely precarious and discontinuous, but then it spread to other types of workers ”, he explains. “Artistic work is not an exception, we ourselves often experience different forms of precariousness in our lives, because perhaps to keep ourselves as actresses or authors we have to do second jobs, ranging from teaching to research, up to the bartender or the waitress. Jobs that often have the same precarious characteristics as ours “.

The last point raised by show business workers is the structural reform of the financing system for the show business, in particular the Single Fund for the show (Fus), from which public funding passes: “We are facing a historical change with respect to 2010s, when we fought against cuts and faced austerity policies. While now for the first time in ten years the public discourse has changed: from Europe for the first time huge resources will arrive, but how will they be spent? One possibility is that the funds go only to companies, the other hypothesis is that they are socialized, directly financing the projects and the workers themselves ”.

For Caleo, therefore, the issues on the table are different and do not have to do only with the imminent reopening or with the support for those who have not worked for a year due to the crisis: it would be a question of imagining a new production system. “Show workers do not want openings at all costs, we want reopening to be done safely, also because our bodies are very exposed to contagion”.

After the weekend demonstrations, there was a response from the institutions: the representatives of the Teatro di Roma, the councilor for culture of the municipality of Rome and the culture minister Enrico Franceschini arrived at the Globe. The minister himself agreed to set up an inter-ministerial table between show business workers, the ministry of culture and the ministry of labor which will have many issues to deal with in the coming weeks.