Protests Over The Blue Man Group

marlaJan 20th, 2005 - 21:22:18

Typical union bleating.....

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H. (Bart) VinceletteJan 20th, 2005 - 22:18:15

I had to respond to the reference to 'typical union bleating' , with the protest at the Blue Man Group appearance in Toronto. The only time in my life I ever walked a picket line , was decades ago for my union .I was so pissed off at the time .I'd just come back from a vacation in Ca., it was summer ; I was .....young.....and summer protocol called for more cash than given doing (yuch!!) ....picket duty .Today , I have a terminal illness , & having a long term disbility plan has made 'things' so much easier.I am so thankful today , that I once walked a most inconvenient picket line.

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AdamJan 21st, 2005 - 02:12:01

Well, that's a great personal story, but it isn't like the people in BMG are mistreated - as clearly stated in the story, and as anyone knows who has followed them, BMG meets or exceeds union standards and agreements. What it doesn't do is restrict itself to hiring performers who are Equity members, because the skills required to be a BMG performer are often combinations found outside of the Equity membership. In other situations in the past they ahve agreed to use only union stagehands, etc., because these skills can be found in abundance within the union, but the performance aspect of BMG relies on the 'artist collective' concept. Equity, by it's nature, narrows down potential skills, and BMG is looking for people with unusual and often unrelated skills to participate in what is essentially performance art, not just acting, singing or other traditional performance disciplines. Equity seems just hell bent on proving that they hold the monopoly on all performance-based skills, and they don't; if they did, their union would be a heck of a lot larger, but they exclude all sorts of skills and experience from their membership criteria.

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marlaJan 21st, 2005 - 03:49:35

you do not need to be in a union to have long term disability benifits. in fact my LTD benifits package is much better now that i'm out of that gawd awful 'union' called the HEU.

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orangewomansingularityJun 3rd, 2005 - 18:00:24

The Blue Man Group offers a diverse collection of musicians, most often from a source of NON UNIONIZED persons, from all walks of life.
One would assume that being a member of the union for you to be hired as a merrit of education or familiarity and not talent would most certainly spell disaster for a group like the BMG, who's very essence is from raw unpolitical talent, not filtered crap from nothing more then a bunch of cronies.

I was in the CAW for 9 years. They were the worst 9 years of my life.
Paying expensive union dues that were paying for few cottages in lake of bays, not my well being...unions can blow now that big brother is watching, if you've got what it takes to survive today's world, you don't need a union to hide behind either.

Blue Man Group is here to entertain, not demote unions, get a life.

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