Stealth Bomb

Aidan Evans is a writer who was alerted to the increasing pressures on screen industry workers created by the legislative changes that followed The Hobbit dispute.

Recently a crew member on a major feature production told me a joke. The crew had been contracted on the basis of being rostered to work any five 12-hour days each week – they never knew more than a few days ahead which days. There was no point in buying tickets ahead to attend concerts or rugby games, for example, or planning to attend family outings or school concerts or kids birthdays. The same applied to their annual leave: they were given at most a few days notice of when they must take it and for how long. This was the joke: some of the crew were placing bets on which personal partnerships would end and which marriages would break up before the shoot ended.

The crew member was laughing, but it was a gallows laugh: his own relationship was one of those ending. So why take the contract? He shrugged. “It looked good; a bit of job continuity, steady income for a while, more than the usual one or two week jobs. Anyway, I thought we could get ahead, get some debts paid off. If you don’t accept the conditions you don’t get the job. There’s plenty of others lined up to take your place.” No pressure, then.

It’s called rights-based bullying: legislation that gives employers the right to dictate these terms. Bullying that starts from the top and filters down. Remember the two key words for bullies: control and choice. Bullies want control for their own benefit. This legislation – courtesy of John Key’s Cabinet, and publicly endorsed by the powerful Richard Taylor of Weta Workshops – now gives screen industry employers the right to set such terms. But it’s up to those employers to choose whether they want to use it – to decide how much they want to exploit the law, and you – or not.

No-one says these are conditions that must be enforced, only that contractees have no equal right to bargain for healthier conditions. Take it or leave it, mate.

Not all workplace bullying is so obvious. Sometimes it’s bullying by stealth, as with the recent proposed changes to the immigration laws. From March next year, the intention is that workers coming to NZ with overseas screen productions for less than 14 days will no longer need a work permit – no guild or industry body approval needed. Fourteen days or less. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Such a little thing. And it was slipped in so quietly. Then you learn that most of the work that sustains crew and actors in NZ is in productions that lasts less than 14 days. The short-term jobs that make this industry just – barely – sustainable will be diminished.

But not if you believe the Minister for Immigration, Jonathan Coleman, who said: “The economic activity and jobs generated are likely to outweigh any missed opportunities for Kiwi crew members and performers.” Really? That’s not the experience of the guilds, which made their concerns known during the earlier consultation on the proposals. Those concerns included:

• the lack of records of how many overseas productions or workers will be involved
• lack of records of environmental damage they may cause
• lack of any organisation responsible for monitoring what they do, where they go, and whether they observe NZ laws and regulations or not – who is there to tell them what they are?

In fact, as Techos’ President Alun Bollinger noted: “John Key seemed blithely unaware, on the Mumbai set of Bollywood film Players earlier this year, that this particular production had left New Zealand with damage to locations and thousand of dollars in outstanding debts. Mr Key chose this visit to posit the government’s intention to make it easier – through changes to immigration policy – for such productions to come in to work in NZ.”

Given the Key government’s ideological commitment to removing all protective regulations in favour of a ‘free’ market (free? – someone always has to pay the bill and that’s going to be us, folks) you could be forgiven for thinking they had been reading The Devil’s Dictionary and had adopted Ambrose Bierce’s definition of prejudice: “A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.”

It’s the removal of those regulations that create the culture where bullying can flourish. Nothing to joke about there.