Guild Update and Industry Challenges

Kia Ora All,

Here we are in September and it is the final run until summer and dare I say it … Christmas.

As I write this article I feel like I am in the twilight zone as this magazine falls between writing for the September issue of NZTecho and our AGM. So it is too early for me to give you all a rousing applauses for turning up to the AGM or be able to congratulate or comment on the election of officers.

One outcome from the AGM that I am privy to in late August is that we will have a new president as Richard Bluck has after four years decided to stand down from office. On a personal level, in my position as executive officer I thank Richard who has offered me constant measured support and an ear to discuss and debate some of those tricky questions that come our way. As with many who hold office within the Guild, much of Richard’s work has gone unbeknown to the majority of members, in fact there is so much that it is not possible to list all the work Richard has done for the Guild in this article. With this in mind there is one area of significant noteworthiness that I feel I must mention and this is the creation of ScreenSafe. ScreenSafe replaced the Guilds original Safety Code of Practice (SCOP) and we must not underestimate the work by those who created this original document as much of this was transferred and used as the backbone for ScreenSafe. ScreenSafe is now the screen industries online living document which reflects the changes that came into place with the introduction of the Health & Safety Amendment Act 2015, now known as WorkSafe. Richard led the charge engaging major players in the industry to ensure everyone not only held a seat at the table but acknowledged their responsibility that safety must remain the most important aspect of any production. If ScreenSafe had not been created by the industry it would have been created by a government agency with the risk that it may not have reflected the complex way in which we as an industry operate. ScreenSafe is a Guild registered company and will be managed by SIGANZ going forward. We are very fortunate that Richard will continue to oversee ScreenSafe for the immediate future. To emphasise the importance of ScreenSafe and the Blue Book, both were recently highly praised by government, acknowledging that as an industry the screen industry has for many years, under its own volition responsibly self-managed.

With much respect Richard, I thank you again.

For each AGM I must, as EO compile a report which covers the significant areas of the Guild from the previous 12 months but it is impossible to include the full contents of the report in this article. There are however a couple of areas I feel I’d like to highlight from the report. One of these is contractual working hours and the continuous working day and the other is crew equipment insurance, with an add-on. Both issue have arisen over the past few months and I would like to highlight the impact for those who did not attend the AGM.

We will return to the question of crew equipment insurance in our next issue.

Contractual hours and the introduction of continuous working day contracts.

This type of contract has been presented over the past couple of year’s predominantly on large productions and is an adoption from a US/European system of work. The last two major productions using this form of contract contacted the Guild in advance to let us know their intention and presented us with their contract addendums. They then let us know the approach they were taking as to requesting crew approval. In both cases crew voted and the contract would only be put in place if there was a majority acceptance. The most recent production additionally listened to feedback from crew who had worked on previous continuous day contracts and attempted to mitigate areas of dissatisfaction.

The guild’s response has been to acknowledge differing needs of a couple of specific departments that we see will have issues with this type of contract and requested explanations as to how the production planned to navigate collaboratively through this.

Ultimately it is up to crew to accept this (as a majority) or not because once these contracts are accepted these are the terms that crew will be working to.

I expect this form of contract will be presented to crew again in the future. Currently crew are respectfully “giving it a go” but if crew find this form of contract untenable it is up to them as a group to not accept this form of contract. Time will tell.

On a different note, we appear in the coming months to have a fairly solid amount of production coming up and we are beginning to struggle to meet demands locally for crew in certain sectors. Much of this work is long form production some of which will continue through to the end of 2019. The commercial market appears to be picking up for summer. Furthermore we have a large number of NZ films and TV series moving into production and additionally quietly sitting under the radar more about to move into the pipeline.

All in all, the screen industry appears to be in good shape