Actually unemployed. I have several actor friends (I live in NYC) who spend roughly half the year auditioning -- if they're lucky. On paper the jobs pay pretty well because they pay union rates but that's because they subsidize large stints of unemployment.
The point he's making is that not that many actors make their living through acting. Also, not many people go to Hollywood with a dream of being a gaffer. When you get a union job, you usually live month-to-month since living in Cali can be expensive.
Like with many other "scalable jobs", you have few winners and many, many losers. Acting, singing, startups, CEOs, traders... they all fall into this category.
Professional actors and actresses can also be in-demand and are often 'recruited' constantly for different projects. They get paid sometimes millions of dollars.
Well 87% of membership earn too little for it to be a career. The union claims 116K active members, so that's 15K people who actually earn money.
Industry figures are that only 1 to 5% of people actually work in anything other than an extra or a day job. So with an active membership of 116K, that's between 1,000 and 5,000 people who actually make a living as actors.
They get a lot of press, and they like it that way, but the framing is kind of messed up, since this isn't a full-time job for most of them.
Right. Average acting income for members of the Screen Actors Guild is a few thousand a year. They're all part-timers, really, always looking for the next gig.
It's not meant for people who are planning an acting career. There's only like 10,000 or so people in the entire guild who have an acting career (using SAG-AFTRA's figures), the rest only do it occasionally. And of those, barely 3,000 actually make any real money.
Acting is not really a viable job career in general, except for those few who get lucky.
> This is why unions exist.
I know, they exist to keep their members in jobs. But the world is changing, and their jobs are changing.
Um, that seems like a consequence of the nature of acting, which is short term gigs with lots of competition rather than a consequence of unionization.
The only actor I personally know just does it on the side for some extra cash rather than it being her day job.
Actors are paid very well, on union scales, when they do get gigs. I suspect well over 80% of actors who get at least one gig per year are going to make at LEAST 10 x $200.
Startups are a different situation, but in fact so different it seems silly to compare.
But the real reason this is on HN is because this is the consequences of applying technology (smartphones, cellular data, cloud scale web services) to an industry (music sales).
I live in LA and have had actor friends tell me that being in the screen actors guild is not very helpful unless you are lucky enough to get a regular role on a series or a big role in a movie. If you're still climbing the ladder, there aren't enough jobs that are union jobs to make it worthwhile. They extra money you make from them is offset by how few of them you're able to get. It sounds similar to our field where there are some high-profile high-paying jobs, but the majority are not those.
The unions aren't for the A-list, they're for the struggling actors who would get paid minimum wage otherwise (or worse, you'd see a lot of "unpaid internships").
The actor comparison is pretty insightful, as a lot of the same dynamics apply:
- There are far more qualified people than could ever be eaten up by the demand for them.
- In practice, most workers of this type can't make it their only job.
- Though a small fraction at the top are extremely well compensated.
- Unionization can allow workers to capture more of the surplus (and has, for actors), but the oversupply is so extreme that it still wouldn't make the job a viable career path for the typical qualified applicant.
I think you just refuted your own point? Some actors are paid millions a year while half earn less than $43,760. This demonstrates that there are unions that represent workers who are paid multiple times the median salary.
I'm very pro-labor union, but life as an actor or screenwriter is considerably more precarious. Each job you get lasts only as long as the movie you're currently working on does. Once the movie's done, you're out of a job again. A SWE doesn't experience the same level of chaos, unless they're freelancing.
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