Equity's Paul W Fleming: Labour AI Plan For Creatives Would "Legalise Theft"

Equity general secretary Paul W Fleming (Photography by Tom Pilston)

Sienna Rodgers

@siennamarla

“This technology is coming. It cannot and should not be stopped. It should be regulated,” declares Paul W Fleming. As the newly re-elected head of Equity, the performing arts and entertainment trade union, he finds himself at the heart of a fast-developing row between creatives and big tech. 

Equity has the benefit of organising workers in a highly unionised sector – with 75 per cent average density in its workplaces, and 95 per cent of TV and film on an agreement – but it is having to contend with new challenges. Fleming believes unprecedented deals will have to be made in response, involving not only payment of his members for output but also for their input.

The dangers are not vague worries for the future, but present ones here and now. Astonishingly, Fleming estimates that already more than 30 per cent of radio adverts we hear are AI-generated.

“We know from members who are asked to do a one-off radio advert, then suddenly they’re hearing their voice in a whole series of commercials,” he explains. “It’s very frightening for a low-paid workforce. Average income for our members from the industry is £15,000 a year.”

Equity is looking to build on the Sag-Aftra collective bargaining agreement that brought Hollywood to a standstill in 2023. It included guardrails for AI but was criticised by some for not going far enough, for example by failing to prevent the use of performances to train AI tools.

As parliamentarians including Labour ones defy the UK government over its approach to the AI copyright conundrum, Fleming has been locked in negotiations with UK production trade body Pact (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) for a year – and has now threatened strike action.

“We have some very clear red lines around loyalty restructuring and around artificial intelligence, and if they’re not met, then for the first time in a generation, we will be considering an industrial response,” he tells The House.

Is there a deadline for reaching agreement? No, says Fleming, but he adds: “We do want it done in the coming months. It’s imperative to give some certainty.” 

They have broken the law. They have stolen our members’ work. Instead of dealing with that problem, they’re wanting to legislate to legalise that theft

The proposals are ambitious, looking to restructure the way royalties work, institute green riders to force productions to be more environmentally friendly, and reform the pre-recruitment process (‘self-tapes’, in which artists are asked to film themselves to audition, are increasingly prevalent and can privilege those with access to studios). And its calls on AI are “quite radical”, he says.

“’AI’ isn’t a thing. AI is a series of technologies. AI is a marketing term which covers a multitude of sins,” says Fleming. There is a difference between body-scanning an artist to replicate them and body-scanning one part of them to create a generic character, say. The latter can go undetected, with artists receiving no ongoing payments.

“Those are very different rights issues and very different employment rights issues, so we’re trying to segment our agreement and deal with each technology in a particular way. There’s no agreement in the world that does that at the minute.”

The Equity boss warns: “Not a single video game is on a collective agreement. Nobody is getting ongoing payments for their voice, for their likeness, for their role in the creative content of video games... If we see that practice happening in film or TV, that is a worry.”

Then there is ‘data-scraping’, in which artists are not even paid for their day’s work of being scanned or recorded: “They’re just having their work, their intellectual property, their likeness, bunged into a machine without their knowledge and probably illegally stolen.”

The government has backed a new exemption to copyright law that would allow AI developers to train models on large data sets freely – unless copyright holders opt out. Critics argue that this rights reservation model is harmful to creatives, putting the burden on them, as maintaining control over their work is almost impossible in practice.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has been criticised for not being tough enough on these issues. Does Fleming believe the government appreciates the dangers of AI in the same way it understands the benefits of helping tech to flourish in the UK?

“We’ve spent three weeks having headlines in newspapers about how they’re going to scrap the Department for Culture – what’s that supposed to tell me?” he shoots back.

“The engagement from ministers from the Department for Culture has been pretty constructive over it, but everybody’s clearly been railroaded by this fetishisation of this big tech AI movement that’s going to fix every problem. What has never been explained to anybody is why this is necessary.

“We have a legal framework. It’s very clear: if you want to use this work, there’s a perfect path to using it. But nobody is using it. So, what does that suggest has happened in order to generate these technologies in the first place? They have broken the law. They have stolen our members’ work.

“Instead of dealing with that problem, they’re wanting to legislate to legalise that theft with a model that is being used in Europe but is also ineffective because we know that only a handful of licences have been handed out to big companies to do it, and yet they’re still producing this tech in Europe.”

Fleming praises former digital and creative industries minister Julia Lopez, who met with Equity “whenever we wanted” and oversaw the Conservative government dropping the copyright proposal now being advocated by Labour. “I’ve not seen the ability of ministers in DCMS under the current government to be able to push back in that way.”

The general secretary, who has been in his post since 2020, notes pointedly that he met Boris Johnson’s culture secretary Nadine Dorries quicker than Labour’s Lisa Nandy.

“We had a very constructive meeting with her,” he says of Nandy. “She said she’s keen to meet again, but it did take 200 days to meet not just me but the three creative unions. That’s representing 100,000 creative workers – 200 days for 30 minutes. And that was only after an angry letter.”

Equity had hoped to see movement at the UK-EU summit in London on access to Europe for performing artists and creative workers, after Brexit made their travel more expensive and difficult. Industry organisation UK Music publicly welcomed the resulting statement about the European Commission and UK recognising “the value” of cultural exchanges, but this union is not impressed.

“A vague passing reference to how important it is, well, the Pope’s a Catholic. It’s very, very, very disappointing. It’s perhaps indicative of a broader issue which we’ve seen about the AI debate, where they’ve not viewed the creative industries as an important growth sector,” Fleming argues.

“Our members are treated like they’re an add-on. They’re treated like a social good.” Too often, he says, the creative industries are tied to education. And even then not seen only as an instrument for other purposes. “’Children should be great at drama so as they can do really good corporate presentations in another sector.’ It’s not an end to itself, despite the fact that the economic evidence of public subsidy is that it massively delivers back into local economies.”

Fleming argues that many nighttime economies and Netflix productions are dependent on cinemas and regional theatres, yet this is not seen as part of industrial strategy.

“There’s a lot of absolutely correct political energy spent in things like steel or heavy industry, which Britain used to do and wants to do in the future, and very little interest paid to the thing we actually do quite well now,” he continues.

“Why is there no problem in pushing the Universal theme park that is dependent essentially on British film production, when there’s a reluctance to removing barriers to touring in Europe?”

I’m glad I was a councillor just so I could give it up and realise how crap it is

The Equity leader won re-election in May for another five-year term on 81 per cent of the vote. Membership of his union now stands at 50,000, making it the biggest in the culture sector and the 12th-largest overall – though he admits “that’s as much a part of our success as it is a damning entitlement of the movement’s failure to recruit”.

Birmingham-born Fleming, 37, was raised by a mother who was a health visitor on a council estate, and a communist father who worked in a car factory and sees him as “a bit of a right-wing sellout”, he jokes. Schooled at a Catholic comprehensive, the union leader studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford – a classic route for politicians.

Why is he not giving an interview to The House as a Labour MP?

“There are lots of very good people in Parliament, I’m not being dismissive of them, but I think you have a much greater impact being a trade union official than you do being any sort of elected representative,” he replies.

Having served as a Labour councillor in Southwark until a few years ago, he adds: “I’m glad I was a councillor just so I could give it up and realise how crap it is. In the Labour Party, what I’ve witnessed is an intellectual decline, an emotional decline, and a social decline that I think is particularly sad.”

He is still a Labour member, having joined it as a student, and even chairs his local branch. But he rules out Equity affiliating to Labour, saying these formal ties are “bad for the party, and bad for the union”. A former organiser at Labour-affiliated Community union, he recalls being told to run industrial action in a local authority not controlled by the party, instead of in a Labour-run one next door.

Fleming does, however, want the union to start a political fund: “I think we should be able to sponsor individual candidates of different parties and indeed no party.” He plans to prioritise local government, which he reckons would produce greater returns from his union’s members.

After all, he is not only disappointed in the Labour government for its stance on AI and copyright but also its benefit cuts. “I don’t think anybody looks around British society and thinks, gosh, the disabled have had a really easy 15 years,” he quips.

Equity is the only union to operate an in-house tax and social security service, he says, revealing that 15 years ago it dealt mostly with tax support but now over 80 per cent of its work is social security – helping members with housing claims, child support, Universal Credit (UC).

Fleming is particularly frustrated by UC’s minimum income floor, used to calculate payments to the self-employed. Its “brutality” was an unintended consequence of the system’s design, he believes, so wants reform.

“It is really poor that the government has not reconsidered that minimum income floor,” he says. “For a long time, there was a fair welfare regime that supported artists when they were out of work, that allowed them to take freelance work, and now that’s entirely gone.”

He favours Scotland’s grant scheme in which artists can apply for money to “live, exist and create”: “They’re not sat in an office clocking in nine to five. They’re going out there, experimenting, and they have a right to fail.”

Fleming has never been a performer himself, nor does he get star-struck by his members, who include Olivia Colman and Dame Judi Dench – both of whom endorsed his general secretary run. He only got a TV during the pandemic.

When he first arrived at Equity, his expectations had to adjust. His first deal was one he inherited at a London theatre in which they doubled the pay of workers with bad wages, and got them holiday pay, National Insurance and overtime. Their reaction? “This is awful.” 

“They are right. Objectively, it’s rubbish. But it is over 300 per cent better than what you had before! I didn’t understand there was a reaction to blame the union and not blame the boss.” He went to the pub opposite and cried: “I cried so hard the barman bought me pints.”

Later, he understood them better: “Most working people take a lot of convincing that they’re artists. Our members take no convincing they’re artists – they take a lot of convincing they’re workers. This whole industry, for hundreds of years, has been set up to tell them that a bohemian lifestyle and low pay makes you more creative and more successful. It is there to destroy solidarity.”

“The truth is, the more dignified, the more stable the work, the better you are as an artist. Which is not a message the Arts Council wants to hear, nor indeed the bosses,” he adds.

Past Labour governments have produced landmark moments for creatives, from setting up the Arts Council to appointing the first minister for the arts in Jennie Lee. Fleming hopes that the government will enact something similarly meaningful for the sector this time.

“There is a moment for the government now,” he declares. “You don’t get charter renewal all the time. You don’t get a chance to reshape the Arts Council all the time. I really hope that they would seize it and seize it on an industrial agenda.”

His Brummie accent purifying, Fleming emphasises: “You get very quick growth. It’s not an infrastructure project, putting on a sodding play, is it?” 

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