A district judge in California has thrown out the last of the claims in a case brought against a touring company by a member of its own wardrobe team. The BBC reported the ruling on 2 September. For anyone who books, manages or works on live shows in Britain, the useful part is not the name attached to it. It is the reasoning, and how little of that reasoning would help a dep player on a wedding gig in Warwickshire or a wardrobe assistant on a small theatre run in the north east.

What the court decided, and what it did not decide

Asha Daniels, a former wardrobe assistant, sued Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc in September 2023. She alleged degradation, forced physical labour, denial of medical care, sexual harassment and racial harassment during a brief period working on the tour that year. District judge Fernando L Aenlle Rocha had already ruled in 2024 that she could not bring the claim against Lizzo as an individual, leaving the company as the defendant.

This month he dismissed what remained. He found the former assistant had not identified conduct by company employees that demonstrated general hostility to women in the workplace, or disparate treatment of men and women. He described the alleged incidents as inappropriate and unprofessional, while placing them within what the US Supreme Court has treated as the ordinary tribulations of the workplace. On an incident in which she says a heavy clothes rack ran over her foot, he wrote that the court does not seek to minimise or disregard the pain felt, but that the injuries do not qualify as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Her lawyer, Ron Zambrano, said they were disappointed, that the decision weighed evidence a jury should have evaluated, and that they are considering appropriate next steps. Lizzo said she was relieved, thanked her lawyers, and said she will continue to fight every claim made against her and her businesses. A separate case brought by three former dancers is denied by her team. Nothing has been proved against anyone, and this piece takes no view on who is right.

The legal threshold is not the same as the standard

Read that ruling as an employer rather than as a fan and one phrase does all the work. Conduct can be inappropriate and unprofessional and still sit outside the reach of the law. That is not a loophole. It is what a threshold is for. A court is asked whether a line was crossed, not whether a workplace was any good.

The industry has a long habit of collapsing those two questions into one. A case is dismissed, the press release says vindicated, and everyone moves on without asking the second question at all. The second question is the one that decides whether a nineteen year old backline tech wants a career in this business by the end of a summer. It is also the one nobody is compelled to answer, because there is no judge attached to it and no filing deadline.

Ask a room of tour managers what the standard is and you will get a straight answer about buses, curfews, load in times and turnaround. Ask what the standard is for how the youngest person on the crew is spoken to at four in the morning after a bad get out, and the answers get vaguer. The technical standards are written down. The behavioural ones mostly are not.

On a touring party, nobody is quite the employer

Here is where a British reader should stop treating this as an American story. A touring party is not one workplace with one employer. It is a stack of separate contracts pointing at the same bus. The artist may trade through a limited company. The monitor engineer invoices. The wardrobe assistant might be engaged for eleven days by a production company that exists for the run and is wound up afterwards. The venue employs the bar staff and the stewards but not the crew standing next to them.

That structure decides who owes a duty to whom, and most people on the road could not tell you the answer about themselves. Under the Equality Act 2010, a self employed person is protected where they work under a contract personally to do work: no real right to send somebody else in their place, and some degree of control exercised over how the work is done. A player who sends a dep at will and sets their own method may sit outside that. A wardrobe assistant told when to arrive, what to do and how to do it almost certainly sits inside it. The distinction is invisible on a call sheet and decisive in a tribunal.

We have written before about how the people who make live music work stay invisible in the credits. The same invisibility runs through the paperwork. The further you sit from the artist, the shorter your engagement, the more likely it is that nobody in the building has written down who is responsible for you.

The UK rules change again at the end of October

On 30 October 2026 two provisions of the Employment Rights Act 2025 come into force, and both matter to anyone running live events. Employers must take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment, rather than the reasonable steps standard that has applied since 2024. The word all is not decoration. It moves the question from whether you did something to whether you did everything you sensibly could, and it will be tested against what a competent operator in your sector actually does.

The second provision revives employer liability for harassment by third parties, covering all types of harassment rather than sexual harassment alone. In a function room the third party is the wedding guest. On a corporate night it is the client's sales team, six drinks in. In a grassroots venue it is whoever is at the front of the stage. Since 6 April 2026, disclosing sexual harassment has also counted as a qualifying disclosure for whistleblowing purposes, which changes what happens to the person who speaks up rather than only to the person complained about.

None of this reaches the wholly independent contractor, and that is the gap. The three provisions above sit in employment law, and a large part of the live music workforce sits just outside it by design. A venue can be fully compliant with everything arriving in October and the freelance sound engineer it hires four nights a week can still be covered by none of it.

The reporting figures are the part that should worry us

A Musicians' Union survey of 725 musicians, around nine in ten of them freelance, reported that 48 per cent had experienced sexual harassment at work. The number that should stop a booker in their tracks is not that one. It is that 85 per cent did not report it, and that 61 per cent believed their freelance status put them at greater risk. Reasons given for the silence included the culture of the workplace and fear of losing work.

Naomi Pohl, then the union's deputy general secretary and now its general secretary, put it to M Magazine like this: “It’s a massive problem with the whole culture of the industry.” The union runs a confidential reporting route, Safe Space, precisely because the formal ones do not reach the people who need them. A grievance procedure assumes an employer to submit the grievance to. Most of this workforce does not have one.

That is the real shape of the thing. Not that the law has failed, and not that every touring party is a problem. Rather that we have built a workforce out of short engagements and separate companies, and then attached most of the protection to a category of worker that a large share of it does not belong to.

So put the question properly. On one side: the standards are visibly better than they were a decade ago, the unions have routes that did not exist, the Employment Rights Act closes real gaps in seven weeks, and a court has just declined to find fault where fault was alleged. On the other: more than eight in ten of the people affected still say nothing, the protections stop at an employment status most of the workforce does not hold, and the behaviour that sits below the legal threshold has never been anybody's job to fix. Does the industry still need to clean its act up? We are not going to answer that for you. We would rather you asked it about your own diary, your own crew and your own next booking, because that is the only place the answer is worth anything.