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At 13, it's YOUR PARENTS that should be in charge of your acting career and helping you understand things like actor unions. If you're getting call backs and thinking about trying to work professionally, you AND YOUR PARENTS should sit down and read through this website. It's designed for families intersted in the entertainment industry:

http://www.bizparentz.org/gettingstarted/parentres...

Unions are designed to help ensure that actors get paid a fair wage and have good work conditions. There are so many people wanting to be actors that it would be easy for production companies to take advantage of the actors. So by joining together PROFESSIONAL actors can negotiate with production companies to make sure they have minimum pay, good work conditions, residuals and other things like that. It's called "collective barganing". Unions also provide things like health insurance, pensions plans, educational opportunties and other benefits for their members.

There are two main unions for actors - Actors Equity Association (AEA or "Equity") for stage actors and SAG-AFTRA for screen actors. The unions have agreements with different production companies where the company agrees to certain work conditions and in exchange the union allows the actors to work for the company. If you belong to a union you should not be working on a non-union production.

Since the union is for professional actors, you can't just join. You have to be eligible to join by having a certain amount and type of experience. Then you have to pay an initiation fee and union dues. So honestly, at this point you're not ready to join a union.

Professional acting is a business. As a minor there are legal requirements and restrictions for you to work in the industry. And there are a lot of scams and rip-offs out there. So like I said, you need to talk to your parents about your goals and make sure they understand the industry.

Good luck.

Kidzworld