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Defending the Standard Contract: Unmeasured Work, Class, and Design Professionalism in United Scenic Artists Local 829

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2020

David Bisaha
David Bisaha*
Affiliation:
Theatre Department, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Email: [email protected]
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How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 231 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2020

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References

Endnotes

1 Lee Simonson is best known for his work designing for the Washington Square Players and the Theatre Guild, for his monumental designs for Lilliom (1921), Back to Methuselah (1922), Dynamo (1929), and Roar China (1930), and his history of world stage design The Stage Is Set (1932). Jo Mielziner's contribution to and influence on American postwar design has been significant, ranging from Street Scene (1929) and Winterset (1935) to A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), and Guys and Dolls (1950), among many others.

2 Today, USA 829 is a nationwide autonomous Local of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), a status that began in 1999 when USA 829 left the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades (IBPAT; today, IUPAT) and reaffiliated with IATSE.

3 There is some difference here between theatre-specific and national union politics, the latter being in a state of retrenchment in the conservative, probusiness 1920s. The situation in theatre was more positive for theatre unions, due to successful strike action by IATSE and Actors' Equity in 1918 and 1919, respectively. Dubofsky, Melvyn and Dulles, Foster Rhea, Labor in America: A History, 7th ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davison, 2004), 227–31Google Scholar; Gemmill, Paul F., “Types of Actors’ Trade Unions,” Journal of Political Economy 35.2 (1927): 299–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Timeline,” www.iatse.net/timeline, accessed 5 June 2017. See also Holmes, Sean P., Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and White, Timothy R., Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Previous histories have noted the new union design contract in the twenties, but have tended to view it either from the perspective of the painters in the union, or as simply an administrative stepping-stone to the artistic dominance of the designer with the New Stagecraft movement. For additional histories of design unionization in the period see Larson, Orville K., Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915–1960 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Philip A. Alexander, “Staging Business: A History of the United Scenic Artists, 1895–1995” (Ph.D. diss., Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, 1999); and Essin, Christin, Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 O. Larson and Essin mainly credit the rise of the designer to the theory and practice of New Stagecraft aesthetics. While I do not disagree with their points, I wish to add that union interventions also had real, immediate, and lasting effects on designers’ ability to work consistently in this field.

6 Recent years have also seen increased interest in the unionization of adjunct and graduate student academic labor, in unionization appeals among workers in ridesharing companies (Uber), and the emergence of unionlike organizations such as the Freelancer's Union and Domestic Workers United, all of which either seek affiliation with existing unions or borrow from traditional labor union tactics to address casual workers’ needs collectively.

7 Lazzarato, Maurizio, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Virno, Paolo and Hardt, Michael (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47Google Scholar.

8 Holmes, 82; Gemmill, Paul F., “Equity: The Actor's Trade Union,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 41.1 (1926): 129–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 135–40; O. Larson, 84.

9 The term “scenic designer” is itself a result of the emergence of design as its own paid occupational category in the 1910s. Before New Stagecraft, artists doing scenic design would be called scenic artists, decorators, or architects.

10 O. Larson, 12–19.

11 This is an incomplete listing and rough count, given simply for illustration.

12 The later regulations paying for work rendered in sketching was noted in 1925 as “the outcome of abuses by managers, some of whom have ordered sketches indiscriminately, using the designers’ creation or not, and paying for the work put in on it or not as they chose.” “Minimum Rate Set for Stage Designs,” The Billboard 37.25 (18 July 1925): 1, 5, 11, quote at 11.

13 This is exemplified by Margaret Anglin's ongoing employment of Livingston Platt at the Toy Theatre in Boston from 1913 to 1915, or of Hopkins and Jones's collaborations. Ranck, Edwin Carty, “An American Stage Wizard,” The Theatre 22.174 (August 1915): 83, 92–3Google Scholar.

14 This earlier organization, the Protective Alliance of Scenic Painters of America (PAPSA), was the first scenic painter's union, and AFL-affiliated in 1895, though this would break down later. Alexander, 32.

15 Emboldened by gains in wages, union recognition, and successful strikes during the First World War, the American Federation of Labor worked actively throughout the 1920s to sustain its gains and continued to seek closed-shop policies—striking when necessary and aggressively expanding union membership, despite a less favorable federal viewpoint toward unionism than it had enjoyed during the war. Dubofsky and Dulles, 213, 224.

16 The affiliation of the United Scenic Artists with the American Federation of Labor dates to 1918, when the group voted to affiliate themselves with the BPDPA. With this vote, the union reconstituted itself as United Scenic Artists of America, Local 829. For the purposes of this essay, USAA and USA 829 refer to the same organization. Alexander, 39.

17 In 1920 a letter from the Allied Designers, asking USA 829 for support for a proposed action, mentioned in passing that they sought exclusive charter over the creation of scale models; Local 829 took exception and appealed the decision to the BDPDA leadership. In 1922, IATSE indicated that if Local 829 did not accept stage architects working in theatre and film into their union, they would bring them into the International Alliance. Minutes, General Meeting of 2 April 1920. United Scenic Artists Records WAG.065, Microfilm Reel 1, Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. This collection is hereinafter cited as USA Records.

18 Here “architect” is a period-specific term for artists who drew plans for three-dimensional forms for the stage and/or screen without overt pictorial “design.” Minutes, General Meeting of 7 July 1922. USA Records, Reel 1.

19 O. Larson, 72.

20 Ibid.

21 Executive Meeting Minutes, 24 September 1924, and General Meeting Minutes, 6 November 1925. USA Records, Reel 2.

22 Simonson's and Mielziner's memoirs suggest about a six-week period for conceptualization, but one in which several projects overlap significantly in initial phases. See Simonson, Lee, Part of a Lifetime: Drawings and Designs, 1919–1940 (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1943)Google Scholar; and Mielziner, Jo, Designing for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio (New York: Athenaeum, 1965)Google Scholar, especially his chapter “Designing a Play,” 23–63.

23 “Minimum Rate Set for Stage Designs,” 11.

24 Unmeasured work is not a term that appears in Marx; I borrow it from the UK's National Minimum Wage Regulations 1999 (no. 584, §I.6), where it refers to “work in respect of which there are no specified hours and the worker is required to work when needed or when work is available”; www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1999/584/regulation/6/made, accessed 13 January 2020. This includes flat-fee employment for a given service, for instance, “being paid £500 to lay a patio, regardless of how long it takes”; see “Minimum Wage for Different Types of Work,” www.gov.uk/minimum-wage-different-types-work/paid-in-other-ways-unmeasured-work, accessed 16 October 2017. In this case, any fee agreed upon must be equivalent to an hourly wage minimum. British law does not provide minimum wage exemptions for professional workers, whereas in US wage law, minimum wage and overtime do not apply to “any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity”; see §213(a)(1) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, www.dol.gov/whd/regs/statutes/FairLaborStandAct.pdf, accessed 16 October 2017.

25 Struggles for wage-based compensation for artistic labor are ongoing. Today, the Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE) movement in New York City seeks to redress these concerns through fee scales for different types of visual and performing arts projects, administered through an institutional certification process. Like the designers, it is particularly invested in combating the idea of art as speculative labor, defined as labor that is paid for only if the art becomes a desired commodity after its production. See “Womanifesto,” WAGE, https://wageforwork.com/about/womanifesto#top, accessed 14 January 2020.

26 These arguments are explained in Chapter 20, “Time-Wages,” of Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 [1867], trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887; online ed. Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995), www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch20.htm, accessed 17 May 2017.

27 According to Marx, piece-wages (Chapter 21) are “the most fruitful source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating” because they “furnish to the capitalist an exact measure for the intensity of labour.” “Piece Wages,” Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch21.htm, accessed 17 May 2017.

28 Ibid.

29 Minutes from meetings from about 1925 through the mid-1930s, quoted in the following notes, show covert and at times overt antagonism between painters and the new and growing design contingent.

30 United Scenic Artists overall had a strong union presence in most shops and enforced a blacklist for managers who flouted union standards. It also included designer-operators among its membership, effectively moving wage change debates into union meetings instead of formal negotiations. As a result, USA 829 had near autonomy to set its own wage scales without negotiating with others, especially with the producers’ organizations. When the union went too far, its membership induced the union to self-correct before employers formally complained.

31 General Meeting Minutes, 1 April 1927. USA Records, Reel 3.

32 General Meeting Minutes, 18 March 1927. USA Records, Reel 3.

33 “Standard Form of Contract Adopted by Scenic Designers,” The Billboard 39.14 (2 April 1927): 9.

34 Lazzarato, 133.

35 Beech, Dave, Art and Value: Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Leiden: Brill, 2015): 320–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. David Graeber agrees with this general view in “The Sadness of Post-Workerism; or, ‘Art and Immaterial Labor’ Conference—A Sort of Review,” lecture, Tate Britain, London, 19 January 2008, https://libcom.org/files/graeber_sadness.pdf, accessed 14 January 2020.

36 Dowling, Emma, Nunes, Rodrigo, and Trott, Ben, “Immaterial and Affective Labour: Explored,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7.1 (2007): 1–7Google Scholar, at 6, www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/7-1editorial_0.pdf, accessed 11 June 2018.

37 Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The Drama Review 56.4 (2012): 10–31, at 25. Similar critiques have been levied by Boyle, Michael Shane, “Performance and Value: The Work of Theater in Karl Marx's Critique of Political Economy,” Theatre Survey 58.1 (2017): 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Hart, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 108–9Google Scholar. “[W]e are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are producing primarily immaterial goods. . . . Our claim, rather, is that immaterial labor . . . is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production” (ibid., 109).

39 Lazzarato, 137–8.

40 For an introduction to professionalism broadly, see Larson, Magali Sarfatti, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Abbott, Andrew, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brint, Steven, In an Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

41 Poggi, Jack, Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870–1967 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 56–7Google Scholar.

42 The 2 percent fee was a percentage dues assessment on contract fees, analogous to the percentage fees taken out of painters’ wages. General Meeting Minutes for 20 September 1929. USA Records, Reel 3.

43 “Artists’ 4-Day Week Aid to Jobless,” Variety 101.8 (4 February 1931): 70.

44 General Meeting Minutes of 8 September 1932. USA Records, Reel 4.

45 General Meeting Minutes for 16 January, 6 March, and 30 June 1933, and 13 August 1934. USA Records, Reel 4.

46 Report of Ways and Means Committee, General Meeting Minutes, 6 March 1933. USA Records, Reel 4.

47 Letter to Miss Ellen Woodward, Federal Theatre Project, dated 28 November 1938. USA Records Box 4, Folder 45.

48 The fine for violating any one of these new regulations was an amount, paid to the union, “equal to the entire price of the work calculated at basic minimum rates”; capitalized in the original. General Meeting Minutes, 6 March 1933. USA Records, Reel 4.

49 Report of Ways and Means Committee, General Meeting Minutes, 6 March 1933. USA Records, Reel 4; capitalized in the original.

50 Also in that meeting, “Bro. Simonson stated that since the designing fee established were [sic] equivalent to wage schedules he could not see the justice of repealing . . . which would plainly indicate to the managers that there was a split in our ranks which was most inadvisable during these strenuous times.” General Meeting Minutes, 16 January 1933, USA Records, Reel 4.

51 General Meeting Minutes, 19 June, 7 July, and 17 July 1933. USA Records, Reel 4.

52 Design by the square foot is not an exact piece-wage, as a minimal, skeletal set with less painted square footage may take more design time and labor than a traditionally painted wing-and-drop set. However, the per-square-foot system aspired to measurement by amount of production—a version of the piece-wage—rather than time or unmeasured-fee minimums.

53 “Scene Designers Make a Must of Authentic Replica Models,” Variety 115.5 (17 July 1934): 46.

54 Executive Board Meeting Minutes, 21 December 1934. USA Records, Reel 5.

55 Executive Board Meeting Minutes, 7 January 1935. USA Records, Reel 5.

56 Jo Mielziner quoted in Executive Board Meeting Minutes from January 1935 [undated]. USA Records, Reel 5.

57 General Meeting Minutes, 15 October 1934. USA Records, Reel 5.

58 Untitled legal brief. USA Records, Box 3, Folder 3.

59 General Meeting Minutes, 21 October 1935. USA Records, Reel 5.

60 Jo Mielziner quoted in Executive Board Meeting Minutes from January 1935 [undated]. USA Records, Reel 5.

61 The first significant threats were jurisdictional disputes with other unions, including IATSE and Hollywood film unions. Later, in the late thirties and afterward, World War II and antilabor activism (resulting in, for instance, 1947's Taft–Hartley Act) kept the union focused on external threats.

62 General Meeting Minutes, 20 July 1936. USA Records, Reel 5.

63 Executive Board Meeting Minutes, 25 March 1936. USA Records, Reel 5.

64 The first full-page, feature articles on theatrical designers in the New York Times ran in the mid-1930s. As the number of working designers contracted, the celebrity status of those few who could still work grew, and individuals such as Lee Simonson, Donald Oenslager, Mordecai Gorelik, and Jo Mielziner began to accrue social capital within the profession, increasing their power as a bloc in 829.

65 The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) was founded in 1959. The Dramatists’ Guild of America was founded in 1919, and while it does advise on contracts, it is organized as an influential professional organization, and is not affiliated with organized labor per se. It did, however, gain standard minimum contracts for work produced on Broadway in 1927. Louis Calta, “Directors Form New Stage Group,” New York Times, 11 February 1959, 48; “Our History,” https://dramatistsguild.com/about-the-guild, accessed 23 January 2020; and Bloom, Ken, Broadway: An Encyclopedia, “Dramatists Guild” (New York: Routledge, 2004), 135–6Google Scholar.

66 Alexander, 273.

67 Jones, Robert Edmond, The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Donald Oenslager, “Scenic Design,” Yale School of Fine Arts Bulletin, 1942–3, Box 31, Folder 2. Yale School of Drama Records (RU 728), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, 7.