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United or Divided?
Date: Labor's Day
Weather: Quaker
I have been a member of Equity for years now. As an independent actor, even with the help of a good agent, you’ll need to cover yourself from unlawful and shameless shams from certain people. Equity is where you place your trust in. They ensure that actors do not get ripped off by greedy media giants and we got what we deserved. Hugo is a huge fan of Equity and encourages everyone under him to join. With a major agent like Hugo and the protection of Equity, I can sleep well through the storms of the media industry.
However working in the library is something else – especially for a university library. Yeah I heard stories about people got redundant during bad financial times but then who doesn’t? Anyway since my uni days I’d heard a lot about university unions and some of their bullish behaviours. There was one semester that my friends at another uni told me that he couldn’t re-enrol because some stupid faculty members wanted higher pay (as if they weren’t paid enough already) and more autonomy (as if they were not autonomous enough already) so they refused to hand over their marks unless the university yielded to their demands. He told me these “academics” were giving out pamphlets outside the library asking for students’ support and condemning the tyranny of the vice-chancellor. The irony was they were terrorising the future of their students with the same tyrannic collateral damage approach. So who is the bigger terror, who knows? But I digress. Working at this space ship library never failed to amaze me. Lately we received a newsletter from the union, whom I’m not even a member of telling us how they are not happy with the management and demanded us to file complaints about the ill-practice of the management. I was really scratching my head when I got the newsletter. Being a part-timer and contract staff, I never really paid attention to what’s going on around me in the library. Partly because I’m not interested and partly because I don’t really hang around with people there.
So what’s the newsletter about? It’s about the extension the library is building to accommodate more students (nowadays universities are just opening up more full-fee paying seats to earn more income). Staff members will also be moved to the new extension so the current areas can be re-zoned for student use. So what’s the union fussing about? On the newsletter was a list of “charges” against the management. As usual, connotations of tyranny was littering all over the place. But some of the funny things I spotted were like “Don’t like that I need to go through another door to go to the staff toilets” (which is exactly what they are doing now) and “Showers should be marked clearly where it can get wet and where it cannot” (what the?). Oh another funny thing was “I heard that there will be CCTV to monitor our work and I don’t like that”. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read those accusations. All I could think of was these people really don’t know how good they are having and just want to waste their lives complaining about things that nobody cares. And the whole conspiracy of CCTV monitoring their work is just ridiculous. If they were actually doing work instead of spending time putting that kind of stupid newsletter together, why would they even be scared of being monitored. Further, the CCTV has nothing to do with the library but a security code the university has to comply with for the building. So where did that imagination of them being monitored by the management through the CCTV come from is beyond normal people’s comprehension. Sometimes I do think that these union people could use their brain power to write a good thriller and maybe that could become the next Australian blockbuster.
However, the union didn’t stop there. They even sneakily went around in the staff room during lunch hours to propagate their cause (which for me has no reason for that “cause”) to solicit support against the management. One day when Claire and I were chatting in the staff room during lunch, George the union leader in the organisation came to pester us to sign the petition. I told him I’m not interested and he immediately lectured me in front of Claire of how selfish I am and thinking that as a part-timer these important issues did not concern me. I was so annoyed that I told him to fuck off and said: “if you hate this place that much maybe you should go somewhere else to work. But then again, with your ability and attitude, I don’t think you’ll last a minute in the real world. Only a workplace like this will tolerate people like you who spend your day demonising the management while getting pay cheques from them every fortnight.”
The whole staff room went quiet and everyone was looking at me. Claire was trying not to laugh and working her ass off to pull a straight face together. Shocked by my remarks, George walked away embarrassingly. I never saw his face near me since then.
Back to the drama school. Things had gone from bad to worse since Leonard left. When I ran into one of the administration people there one day at the uni café, she told me that on top of a deficit, a number of high profile donors have retracted their support for the drama school and some well-known figures in the arts industry have informed the drama school that they have changed their wills and wrote the drama school off their lists. The Board starts to get panic about these but Succubus was not concerned. She said that the drama school doesn’t need these people as she knows other better industry figures. I don’t know how this whole fiasco is going to end but certainly from other people I know, none of them think the drama school has a bright outlook.
However, I don’t really have time to think about the drama school that much as I’m working hard to further my acting career – at least to get out of this space ship and do some real work in the real world. Went to a friend’s play the other night and ran into some important figure at the post performance drinks. We got along really well and were surprised to find out that we love the same things and have the same wicked humour. We exchanged our business cards and he told me to keep in contact cos he probably has something in the pipeline with a major Hollywood figure that I could get involved. I was ecstatic about the whole unplanned outcome. Hopefully this could mean a breakthrough of my acting career.
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