Protesting the skinny budget: Union actors and musicians fight Trump’s attacks on the arts
If President Donald Trump is serious about creating jobs in the nation’s heartland then he needs to rethink his own proposal to eliminate federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the agency that helps fund the not-for-profit groups behind thousands of the theater and music productions seen every year in middle America.
That’s the analysis of leaders of the labor unions Actors’ Equity and American Federation of Musicians, two organizations that could see employment among their members crippled if the cuts in Trump’s so-called “skinny budget” are enacted into law. The current NEA annual budget of $148 million is small but important, they say.
Mary McColl, executive director of Actors’ Equity, which represents more than 50,000 stage actors and stage managers, says that most members work in non-profit organizations, outside of the commercial entertainment capitals of New York and Los Angeles. They don’t rely exclusively on NEA funding for their paychecks, she says, but the NEA is critical in the mix of public and private funding that keeps live theater performances coming year after year in the country’s smaller cities.
“The NEA is like a stamp of approval,” McColl explains.
NEA grants allow a typical theater troupe to get matching funds from state or city governments, corporations and philanthropists, according to McColl. In this way, NEA funds act as “seed money” that is crucial in sustaining theater groups in small cities where the local economy is too weak to provide full support.
Small cities and towns will be hit the hardest by Trump’s proposed defunding of the NEA, McColl says.
“This is an unbelievably reckless and irresponsible idea from someone who wrote The Art of the Deal. The president says he wants to create jobs—he can start by protecting our nation’s investment in middle class art jobs,” she says.
The argument in favor of NEA funding as a sustainer of jobs in middle America was similarly articulated last month in Washington, D.C., by Actors’ Equity President Kate Shindle, a former Miss America beauty queen and self-described Republican.
“There is so much irrefutable evidence that the arts serve as an economic engine, even and especially in cities and towns whose factories or industry jobs have disappeared. All together, the arts are a $700 billion industry employing directly 4.7 million Americans and millions more indirectly,” she told a press conference March 16.
Shindle’s press conference was unusual. The union is generally “quiet” on political and social issues, McColl says, “But we are far less quiet (now) than we have ever been before … Our members are looking to us to step out,” in the face of this new attack.
Ray Hair, president of the 80,000-member American Federation of Musicians (AFM), tells In These Times that “the damage would be irreparable,” if Trump’s proposals go through.
Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance journalist. A staff member of the Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association between 1996 and 2006, he has no financial ties to the maritime industry.
Add new comment