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This article examines two cases of successful efforts by UK trade unions to mobilise contingent workers. The evidence strongly illustrates the explanatory potential of Kelly's mobilisation theory (1998) and deepens understanding of how mobilisation processes work within unions. The findings emphasise the important of officers and activists in framing collective interests as 'cultures of solidarity ' (Fantasia 1988). Solidarity both within groups of contingent workers and between them and the wider union are both essential for successful mobilisation. Building solidarities helps these workers overcome their inherently weak position in the labour market; a process that is essential to understand in greater detail if we are to understand union revitalisation efforts more widely.

This article explores the reproduction of gendered, racialized conceptions of age and appearance in structuring access to performing work. Analysis of this issue leads to discussion of a key supposition: that central work experiences of women performers are manifestations of their position as formal and informal proxies for women's experiences in wider society. Women performers are formal proxies in that they are employed to 'be women'; to represent women for consumption in the circuit of culture. They are informal proxies in that they are allocated to highly segmented labour markets based on wider patterns of gendered, racialized social relations.

There has been little research on the entertainment industry trade union Equity, one of the few longstanding examples of a union that organizes contingent workers as core members. An explanation for this is considered to be the perception of acting as not ‘real’ work. The article argues that this perception has analytical relevance and explores the interconnection of historical, ideological and economic issues in accounting for employment phenomena.

Discussion of aesthetic labour has largely been confined to areas of interactive service work. However, current criteria for the presence of aesthetic labour have long been part of the labour process of performers and in an unusually overt and accepted way. Here, embodied characteristics are explicitly rewarded or marginalized. Much of the entertainment industry is predicated on recruitment based on physical characteristics and in this article empirical research with women performers working in theatre and television in the UK is used to extend ideas on issues around aesthetic labour. KEY WORDSaesthetic labour / embodied attributes / recruitment / women performers Use of the performer Nahoum-Grappe (1993) notes the 'social function of aesthetic information' and that in relation to faces and bodiesThe aim is to attract the gaze of the person whose attention one wants … Holding another person's attention is one of the preconditions of social interaction …Thus we can say that the primary purpose of physical display is more functional than aesthetic. (1993: 92, emphasis added) aking this aim as a starting-point, it is arguable that the more functionally complex the reasons for wishing to attract a gaze, the more closely specified is the desired aesthetic information. This article looks at performing work in theatre and television, an occupation where close specification of 761