With just three days to go, available tickets cost between £700 and £2,200, with hospitality packages priced at more than £3,000.
Such figures for a ceremony lasting less than four hours have incensed the unions, which say that profits are not being shared with ordinary workers.
Many of the 3,000 dancers, acrobats and actors who will contribute to the show were working for low wages, or even for free, and were pointing to “glaring inequality and discrimination”, said the SFA spokesman.
Show dancers were recruited “under shameful conditions, or without payment”, the spokesman added.
It comes as other unions threaten similar strike action during the ceremony, which is expected to be attended by up to 600,000 people.
Pay rates for the evening range from between the equivalent of around £50 to £1,400 for entertainment professionals.
They’re currently threatening strike action. Which would be very fun indeed.
Thing is, if the authorities said, fair play, off you go then. Strike. I have a feeling that they wouldn’t. And that if they did the overall effect would be thoroughly good for the longer term impact on France. Not sure what the Frog for “taking the piss” is but I’d expect the general population to think that of the unions for a long time afterwards.
Should have used NHS staff instead of professional dancers.
But oh wait, no other country has one! Chalk another W up for the envy of the world.
They are obviously calculating that the opening ceremony is the only part of the whole shebang worth watching. And who’s to say they are wrong?
If the organisers didn’t plan for this by suppressing the original wage offers and giving themselves room to pay the Dane when the time came then they deserve to have the ceremony disrupted.
And who’s to say they are wrong?
Anyone who sat through Danny Boyles 2012 woke cringe-fest.
“..incensed the unions, which say that profits are not being shared with ordinary workers.”
Lol! you think the Olympics make a profit!? Nope. Don’t despair though dear union leader, strike or no strike , your members will still have contributed to making this event possible, via their past and future wage deductions spent by the ministry of re-electing Mani.
Isn’t this usual for the Olympics? Any revenue they produce is captured by the usual suspects. To everyone else involved they’re a cost.
Thing is, if the authorities said, fair play, off you go then. Strike. I have a feeling that they wouldn’t. And that if they did the overall effect would be thoroughly good for the longer term impact on France. Not sure what the Frog for “taking the piss” is but I’d expect the general population to think that of the unions for a long time afterwards.
That’s based on the supposition that the Olympics are popular with the French. From what I’ve heard coming out of France, they’re not. As far as Parisians are concerned, if the whole jamboree collapsed & didn’t happen they’d be overjoyed. And if the organisers were bankrupted in the process they’d be even happier.
Like most sport, the Olympics are popular because of the relentless propaganda regarding their popularity. Mostly it’s an illusion.
How is the Olympics good for Parisians? This time of year, the tourist industry is working at capacity anyway. So you replace the normal high-spending tourists with the cheapskate sports enthusiasts. And expect to make more money? With the city dysfunctional because of all the road closures?
It was exactly the same with the London Olympics.
Interesting… Large-scale choreography is not that difficult, and you don’t need professional dancers at all for most, if not nearly all of it.
Just your average jazz ballet amateur or something similar. Or any warm body with a sense of rythm willing to wear silly kit and march to some beat waving a hankie.
And with modern projection tech, especially post-corona where an “outbreak” could well wipe out most of an “ensemble” fora section, there’ll be a Plan B… Not involving dancers at all.
A problem that’s quickly and efficiently sorted then….
Methinks the “artistes” have an overinflated notion of their actual importance, and may well find out tout-suite…
Could see this with the bar take with Sunday’s Euro Cup. Yep, the bar was packed with football enthusiasts making a fecking racket. And drinking small beers. Bar doesn’t make its money out of small beers. The big profit’s on cocktails at 12€ a go. Bar sold hardly any cocktails. Bar staff too busy serving small beers.
“Large-scale choreography is not that difficult, and you don’t need professional dancers at all for most,”
There’s always problems with amateurs, though…
https://youtu.be/EbFLGi4KhHo?feature=shared
@Grikath
There’s a presumption there that people want to provide entertainment virtually free. Or in reality at their cost, since there’s rehearsal time, travelling time, inconvenience time etc etc etc. How many people want to do that?
You’re reliant on propagandising people to think they benefit by taking part. Why should they? These days that’s only going to work on people don’t have any talent. People with talent want to monetise it.
I think you could do this sort of thing with people because of people’s desire to be watched. The advent of camera phones & social media have short cut that. You want to be watched doing a dance routine you video yourself & disseminate it. It’s quicker & easier & produces better results. There’s always the chance your vid will go viral & be viewed by millions. Even a chance that you could become a “video star” & seriously monetise it.
The sheer volume of this stuff I see is astounding. Whatsapp Updates will typically have half a dozen a day. But I’m actually plugged in to the sort of people who would do this sort of thing. I know professional dancers. (Or professional in the unlikely event they can get paid for it) They are not going to do a number for you for nothing or beer money. There’s no incentive to.
bis,
I don’t know about London but a number of businesses went bust in Weymouth during the London Olympics because the usual tourists stayed away and even though they’d done a good job with some of the events sailing isn’t really a spectator sport.
We had a couple of tickets and the car park attendant sad it had been dead. Between me and my mate we probably spent £10 plus parking which I think was about £5. The average tourist to Weymouth is going to spend more than that per day.
And although it’s anecdotal, during those few days we spent in France 2 weeks ago we didn’t see any mention of the Olympics, not even in the supermarket.
Profits are what’s left *after* whatever has been shared with workers. If people want a share of what’s left afterwards they should own a share of what generates it.
BIS,
“You want to be watched doing a dance routine you video yourself & disseminate it. It’s quicker & easier & produces better results. There’s always the chance your vid will go viral & be viewed by millions. Even a chance that you could become a “video star” & seriously monetise it.”
Yeah. The media industry used to have high barriers to entry and they’re disappearing. And you don’t even need them for publicity. If your work is really good, people tell their friends. And you don’t need long for that to lead to exponential growth. You tell 100 people, they tell another 100. They tell another 100 and a million people know about you.
And if you run it yourself (because you can) you keep all the money. Like everyone talks about men exploiting women in porn, but the women are making nearly ALL the money now. Some woman does an Only Fans? She has to give 20% to the platform. Then maybe she pays for a camera guy, and some male dick. Who are making far less as there’s a glut of them.
Or any warm body with a sense of rythm willing to wear silly kit and march to some beat waving a hankie.
We should send them some Morris Dancers.
@BiND
We were in Chambéry around the same time and saw no sign of Olympic preparation. We were delighted, on returning from Strasbourg, that the “39 steps” taking you from Gare de l’Est to Gare du Nord have been supplanted by an escalator (up only) – that must be something to do with the Olympics. 🙂
Bloody hell!!
I always thought the idea of staging the Olympics in Brisbane was stupid.
Still, I’m sure we can fuck it up even worse than the Parisians.
Who has the leverage here? The unions may think that they have it because it would be difficult to change the show or replace the performers at short notice. But as Grikath says, the organisers probably do have alternative plans in case of disruption from any cause. Also, sabotaging such a major event by refusing to work would be career suicide for all the performers involved. Who would risk hiring them after that? Then there’s the fact that any disruption to the Olympics would embarrass the French government, which wouldn’t hesitate to use authoritarian measures to prevent that. Maybe a few people might risk it, but not enough to have any noticeable effect.
Also, sabotaging such a major event by refusing to work would be career suicide for all the performers involved. Who would risk hiring them after that?
I very much doubt it would make the slightest difference to the talent. The pain would be felt by who hired them & more so by who retained the hirers.
@BiND I don’t know about London…
Hotels in London may have made money by hiking their already astronomical prices. But the rest of the hospitality industry & retailing?
Olympic visitors are basically low grade crap. They’re budgeted for the event entrance money & not much else. They are not running up big bills in restaurants, bars & clubs. They are not spending in the shops. That isn’t why they’re in town. And most of them can’t afford that.
An Olympics is like a giant invasion of back-packers. And not even Australian back-packers.