NC22: The Perfect Storm: A TCG MegaLAB on Theatre's Labor Justice and Workforce Crisis
The Perfect Storm: A TCG MegaLAB on Theatre's Labor Justice and Workforce Crisis was a session presented at the 2022 TCG National Conference: Pittsburgh.
If there is one area of desperation and disruption that nearly every theatre practitioner is facing in our post-pandemic landscape, it’s the tangled web of crises emerging from our field’s workforce challenges. Those in hiring positions are being met by a maelstrom of seemingly impossible setbacks that are tied to the “great resignation” and other factors at play in the greater U.S. and global economy; those in the labor market are recovering from years of work shortages and project standstills while also ensuring that their futures can be secured by equitable wages and a stronger support system, in our unions and in our theatres. These labor justice and hiring conversations are directly connected to other immediate complications, like filling our houses again and the future of subscription models, as well as to our systemic problems, like the limitations of the conventional theatre business model and existential threats seeded by extractive, capitalistic practices. Every theatre person has a different perspective on the challenges at hand, which feel vast and insurmountable to some – and TCG invites you to bring those perspectives into a collaborative working space. This 2-hour turbocharged TCG LAB is an homage to the hackathons that are run in tech-driven spaces; we will carve out forward-thinking, strategic space for priority focus areas of this perfect storm, relying on emergent facilitation to guide us in collectively finding some light at the end of this tunnel.