Industry Pay and Conditions
Having just held an initial meeting following wrap on the New Zealand leg of ‘Players’ shoot (aka the ‘Indian-Italian Job’ feature-film out of Bollywood) I have that old feeling of déjà vu… The issues overall are not dissimilar from, and certainly not unrelated to, those generally arising in the industry. I was tempted to set aside late payment, but it’s been brought up before by members in my time with the Guild, and will not go away in an environment of independent contractors if those same contractors take it lying down. When someone doesn’t pay on time it means you (your business) is propping up another company’s finances, acting as a defacto bridging financier, or worse being duped in the hope you’ll eventually accept a lesser fee, or possibly give up altogether. Getting paid requires setting clear expectations of how this will happen, ideally agreed to before the fact, and including reasonable penalties that the contractor is both willing and ready to impose if payment is delayed. A healthy company contributing to a robust screen industry does not need to rely on crew to extend it credit. The can-do attitude of New Zealand crews is laudable and no doubt a key asset, but invites misuse when it comes to settling terms of engagement. New ideas about workplace bullying suggest those individuals who immediately challenge behaviour they don’t like are least likely to be targeted by bullies. Others – often among the most competent in their work – use their emotional intelligence to try to find human reasons for the behaviours. They hope the bad behaviours are an aberration, they don’t want to complain, they want things to go well – they want collaboration. They try to give their – usually less competent – colleagues a second chance. The result is depressing – the Nice Guys tend to be the targets of bullying. In other words the Nice Guys finish last because they try to give the benefit of the doubt. I’m not for one minute suggesting this is reasonable or right, but rather that it’s worth wondering if this may be a pattern in business generally to be aware of.
Additional issues on ‘Players’ can be roughly summarised as dissatisfaction over work conditions, the worst of which endanger life and limb. When dissent first stirs among crew about such conditions divide-and-rule strategies are currently applied to great effect, and ‘Players’ was no different (perhaps more extreme but not fundamentally different) in this respect to other cases. Beneath issues of both payment and conditions lie solutions that rely on unity of action, turning up at the negotiation table together. The unity in turn must be founded upon a fundamental belief shared by crew – that they have something of value to offer when they turn up at the table.
Dave Brown (see page 18) bemoans the pittance paid to our friends in the music industry. My instinct is to grimly agree (a joke I have with a friend is that his chosen role as a poet is the only conceivable way he could find to earn less than from his other job… making music). Certainly no argument from me that the majority of musos barely scrape by, but then this is also certainly true of actors. Thinking a little more, I grew up with a group of people who now make a reasonable living from working on live music and events. What’s really interesting in drawing comparisons between music and screen is something Tim Riley (see page 4) said to me, on more than one occasion. It fascinated me then and has stayed with me since: musicians, these days (even the very young and new to the industry) have firmly in the front of their minds the importance of the business part of ‘the music business’. This is a major development in a relatively short period, and one that shares a timeframe, as I’ve noted before, by an almost total shedding of cultural cringe around local music. Unfortunately I do not observe the same to be true of the screen production industry. Maybe we should start calling it the screen business… what’s in a name?
Okay, the parallels between these two sectors are not complete. But the hard truth is the screen sector is largely composed of independent businesses (including sole traders), a great many of whom fall short of acting accordingly. Tim’s description of the master/servant paradigm behind employee status is helpful to keep in mind. In contrast, independent contractors must not expect paternal protections (by employers) in exchange for control (of employees). Screen industry contractors by and large seem, in reality, to fall into some muddy in-between place where control is exerted over them with few concomitant protections. Examples of exceptions regularly come from those contractors who themselves employ (or subcontract) staff. It’s perhaps easier for these contractors to view themselves as businesses, to appreciate that they take on risk accordingly and can apply various smart strategies to protect themselves.
I think there’d be great progress if each screen contractor really saw themselves as a business selling a specific service to the production. The effectiveness of this was illustrated on ‘Players’ where savvy service providers withheld services until full payment was received. I’m not suggesting this is possible for everyone, but the principle stands.
If the local workforce – onset and offset crews (including production office crew) – see themselves as a worthy commodity we will see much better outcomes i.e. productions will continue to come here for more than just mountains that are a hop, skip and a jump from cosy forests and grassy plains… The New Zealand screen industry’s added-value is skilled crew – locations can and are changed, the best asset any production has is a highly skilled and dedicated team. Surely this is what we want to foster for the future.
Thinking about these issues takes looking at the long view, asking fundamental questions – where is this industry going? Thinking about issues job by job is an inbuilt hazard of the screen industry. Each individual has to consciously overcome this in order to contribute to ‘strategic thinking’. To wonder how the things agreed to on each job slowly shape the entire industry.
Finally, more and more I think minimums are a key mechanism for ensuring this industry maintains conditions acceptable to its crews (and what is the industry without crews?) conditions based on minimums can be clearly stated: it’s that, or it’s nothing. No matter how much we might want to make things happen, if we are clear on the bottom line, we’ll find more happens that we like than we don’t.
