Anyone can be a cashier if they can count, are attentive, accurate and know how to keep their mouth shut.
There have been various letters to the editor in the Daily Racing Form over what a bettor desires in a teller.
Teamsters Local 707, Suffolk County Legislator Kevin McCaffrey President, represents Nassau OTB employees and/or collects their money. Perhaps Sara Ziff might consider forming a union to represent Nassau OTB employees who are so often told that they don't have a real job and see what she might do for the bettors and OTB employees who do not wish to see themselves in the positiion of the dearly departed "workers" of the late NYC OTB.
A New Alliance Steps Up to Protect a New Generation of Models
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Sara Ziff was a 14-year-old student at the Bronx High School of Science
when a fashion photographer “discovered” her as she was returning to her
family’s apartment in Greenwich Village.
Within months, she was modeling for Calvin Klein and Seventeen magazine,
but she soon encountered some compromising situations. When her
modeling agency sent her to a photographer’s apartment for a shoot, he
told her to take off all her clothes. At age 15, she was sent to another
shoot where drugs flowed freely and she was ordered to pose against a
backdrop of explicit images from an adult magazine
Now, Ms. Ziff, 31, is seeking to help the next generation. Ms. Ziff —
who still works as a model and recently graduated magna cum laude from
Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in political science — has
founded an unusual labor organization for fashion models. It aims to
prevent abuses like agencies cheating models out of pay and coercive
contracts dictating that 15-year-old models not let the circumference of
their thighs or waists grow.
Its motto could be “5-foot-10, Size-Zero Workers of the World Unite.”
In its year of existence, the group, the Model Alliance,
which is backed by big-name models like Coco Rocha and Milla Jovovich,
has already registered a major victory. In October, New York’s governor,
Andrew M. Cuomo, signed a bill the alliance championed that
significantly increases protections for child models by, among other
things, requiring agencies to provide a chaperone whenever models under
age 16 are sent to a fashion casting or shoot.
The Model Alliance hopes to succeed where a previous union for models
fell short. In the 1990s, Donna Eller, a model with the Wilhelmina
agency, created the Models Guild, which, backed by a major labor union,
sought to unionize models. But after an initial splash, the glamorous
guild fizzled, as modeling agencies resisted the idea of unionizing and
many models worried that agencies would blacklist them for union ties.
Eager to lure models to her new group, rather than spook them, Ms. Ziff
says the alliance is not seeking to unionize agencies or bargain
contracts. Instead, it is vigorously promoting a longtime labor strategy
— strength in numbers — to press for better conditions. In that sense,
it resembles a host of new, innovative labor efforts, like the
Freelancers Union and the fast-food workers’ movement, which have
sprouted up in an era when unions are in decline. At a time of high
unemployment when many workers are on the defensive, these groups have
become laboratories struggling to reinvent and reinvigorate labor
advocacy to advance the cause of particular groups of workers.
Ms. Ziff, who has been a face for Tommy Hilfiger and Stella McCartney,
acknowledges that models’ concerns are often met with little sympathy.
“A common comment we hear is, ‘You’re being paid to look pretty. Just
shut up. You don’t have a real job,’ “ she said. “My response is:
Modeling is a job, and we deserve basic protections like any other
worker, and it’s all the more important when you realize that it’s an
industry that relies heavily on children, often just 14, 15, 16 years
old.”
Ms. Ziff first entertained the idea of unionizing models when she and
her then boyfriend, an New York University film student, were making a
documentary about models. That film, “Picture Me,”
released in 2009, shows Ms. Ziff and other willowy models at parties
and fashion shows, but it also highlights their 18-hour days on runways
in New York, Paris and Milan. One American model tells of a famous
photographer who urged her to remove her clothes and perform a sexual
act — and of being in perpetual debt to her agency because it billed her
for flights to Europe, for models’ apartments and for preparing and
distributing her photo book.
After the documentary’s initial screening, where numerous models told
their own stories of abuse, Ms. Ziff became convinced that something
needed to be done. That was when she first met Susan Scafidi, director
of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute, who offered to help — but
balked at any talk of unionizing.
“Founding a union makes a strong oppositional statement that scares off
people,” Ms. Scafidi said. “All of our conversations have been about how
do we make change happen.”
The two pointed out that models tend to be far younger and less securely
employed than workers in other professions, especially now that the age
of the supermodel — a Cindy Crawford or Iman — seems to have passed.
That makes models increasingly interchangeable “clothes hangers,” less
able to take chances in the here-today, gone-tomorrow modeling industry.
Carolyn Kramer, former head of the Marilyn Model Agency, stressed how
difficult it is for working models to challenge the status quo. “They’re
still modeling so that makes it hard for them to come after the
modeling agencies,” Ms. Kramer said. “And it’s the agencies that start
this insidious pattern of young girls being exposed to sex, sexual
harassment, drugs, alcohol and being pushed not to finish school.”
After Ms. Ziff founded the alliance last year, the group’s leaders
deliberately focused on what they thought would be winnable issues.
Early on, it persuaded New York Fashion Week
to bar photographers from the changing areas where models dress for the
runway. Too often, models complained, photographers shot them while
they were changing, and those topless photographs found their way onto
adult websites.
The group has also worked with designers and agencies to fight anorexia,
a common industry hazard. It urged Vogue to stop using dangerously thin
models or models under age 16, and soon afterward Vogue stopped doing
so.
The alliance has promoted a model’s Bill of Rights, and is pushing for
more transparency in pay. The industry’s modeling agencies typically
take a 20 percent commission and impose a 20 percent service fee on a
model’s earnings. (While top models may command tens of millions a year,
the average pay for models was $42,670 in New York last year and
$26,110 nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
By far its main achievement has been the unanimous enactment of New
York’s child model law, which in addition to a chaperone guarantees a
tutor whenever a child model under age 16 misses three or more
consecutive days of school. The law affords child models the same
protections as child actors and dancers.
Brittany Mason, a fashion model and former Miss Indiana, applauds Ms.
Ziff for training a spotlight on the industry’s problems.
When she first moved to New York as a teenager, Ms. Mason said, she
faced significant pressure to be dangerously thin. “I was running on a
treadmill five miles a day, and they told me not to have any
carbohydrates,” she said, noting that her agency tested her urine for
carbohydrates. “I was eating just sugar-free Jell-O. I lost so much
weigh that it was painful to lie on my side.”
She said that she — just like Ms. Ziff — once hired a lawyer because an
agency owed her tens of thousands of dollars for months. For both women,
as soon as their lawyers wrote, the agencies paid up.
“It’s great that Sara has been creating awareness of these problems — there wasn’t enough awareness before,” Ms. Mason said.
With its membership at about 400, the alliance might find it hard to
achieve some of its more ambitious, longer-term goals. The group is
discussing whether to push for a law in New York that would make models
employees, rather than independent contractors. Under federal law,
contractors cannot sue for sexual harassment or discrimination. Another
idea is to fight to revamp the standard model’s contract. Such contracts
bind models to an agency, but do not create any duty on the agency to
help find them work.
The alliance has faced little criticism from the industry — perhaps
because its strategy so far, as Professor Scafidi described it, has been
more “Erasmus not Luther — to work inside, to forge alliances, not to
nail one’s complaints on the Fashion Week tents.”
Nicole Miller, the designer, said she welcomed the new group. “It’s
definitely needed because all other industries have something like this,
and we’re the one industry that didn’t,” she said.
But she said for many designers, the jury is still out about the alliance. “I think we have to wait and see,” she said.
Steven Kolb, chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of
America, said his group worked with the alliance in supporting the child
model law, noting that his council recommends that designers not use
models under age 16 on Fashion Week runways.
But his group has sometimes differed with the alliance. Ms. Ziff, for
example, objected to his council’s decision to team up with Organic
Avenue, a chain that sells juices, food cleansing programs and snacks,
contending that the partnership would put even more pressure on models
to lose weight.
Mr. Kolb dismissed such criticisms, saying the effort was aimed at improving nutrition.
For veterans like Ms. Ziff and Ms. Rocha, who has done dozens of fashion
covers as well as campaigns for Chanel and Dior, the alliance offers a
chance to achieve lasting change.
At 16, Ms. Rocha recalled that she was 108 pounds and 5-feet-11. Still,
she said her agency pressured her to lose weight.
Years later, Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor who now is artistic
director for Condé Nast, Vogue’s parent, invited Ms. Rocha to join a
panel on how to improve the industry. Ms. Wintour, she said, “made me
think I could really help change the industry to the good if I found the
right place.” For her, that place is the Model Alliance.
“I want to leave the industry as not just someone who had some covers
and some campaigns, but as someone who improved the industry,” Ms. Rocha
said.
“It’s a great industry. I love it. But like all industries, it needs some change.”
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