Ms Karan O'Loughlin:

Does anybody else have ideas around the vulnerability of the freelancers? Organisations have their handbooks. All organisations will say that what is in those handbooks applies equally to all people, whether they are employees or freelance. That works very well on paper but it does not work in practice because those procedures are not equally applied to the freelancers for a couple of reasons. Freelance people do not have any rights to fall back on whereas employees do, so there is more pressure on organisations to apply the procedures to employees. It is difficult sometimes to link the incident to the effect because, as some actors that we represent tell us, their phones just stop ringing. That can happen for many reasons, and it is very difficult to pinpoint the reason as the time that they complained about something on a particular production. It is a small artistic community and the people are working for the same employers most of the time. Freelancers have no rights to fall back on, and that is the problem. That is why I emphasised the worker versus employee scenario, because I do not see a situation where that playing field can be levelled unless freelance people can have access to the same protective rights as employees.