Slaves to time: Why we need to shine a spotlight on crew conditions

Being forced to work long hours on set isn't just a matter of being overworked, it can be a serious breach of a production's duty of care.

This one is for anyone who's ever organised a film shoot, regardless if you feel like a producer or not.

If you hadn't already noticed, the big American film union stepped back from the brink of the first nationwide strike in its history because, to a large extent, the producers folded. Similar, if less militant, rumblings have come from unions in other countries. That sounds great, but there's a problem: it only protect people working for producers who have signed the union agreement, which doesn't apply to the overwhelming majority of people.

The problem we're trying to solve

To be fair, very few people - now including the American producers' organisation, the AMPTP - think that the situation which has long existed on American film sets is a good idea. The super-long, sixteen-plus hour days were fairly rare, usually found only on short productions such as commercials, but working week after week of twelve or thirteen hour days, plus the drive home, is enough to create a fatigue debt that isn't easily repaid in a weekend - if there was a weekend, with calls pushed late on Friday easily allowing a long day to drift into Saturday morning.

The issue of travel time is a vexed one for labour organisations all over the planet, and in the big cities where a lot of filmmaking takes place, that can easily add an hour or more to both ends of the day. The Los Angeles studio zone is a 30-mile radius around the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards between Hollywood and Beverly Hills (formerly the site of the AMPTP headquarters), while the London equivalent is very roughly the same size, and enclosed by the M25 ring road. Both include vast swaths of teeming modern cities through which commutes can be arduous.

Driving home is one thing; driving into a telephone pole is another, and some crews became sufficiently desperate that rotas of telephone conversation partners have been organised in a desperate bid to keep people awake. Again, as elsewhere, the hours are compensated – even generously – and crew may feel obliged to make hay while the sun shines, take the overtime, and maintain eligibility for benefits including, crucially, healthcare, which is dependent on union hours worked. Still, while the spirit may, for a while, be willing, the flesh has its limits and money is no comfort to the dead. More commonly, film and TV workers increasingly complain that home and family life is being cruelly curtailed, relationships broken down, and the impact of long-term, continuous fatigue provokes problems with both mental and physical health, even if it doesn't affect people’s work.

Brent's Rule, proposed after camera assistant Brent Herschman died after falling asleep at the wheel after working a twenty-hour day on Pleasantville, would have sought to limit work days to a mere fourteen, as if a 70-hour week is safe. The late, great, Haskell Wexler, ASC, called his working-time movement 12 On, 12 Off, making sixty hour weeks a target, let alone a maximum. Even when various union agreements are observed to the letter, these numbers leave very little time for anything but work and sleep. Cultures across the world have independently evolved five-day working weeks with something like a third of each day devoted to labour. Early humans devoted far smaller proportions of the day to their hunter-gathering, but to maintain an advanced society with international travel, cellphones and movies, more is required.

Low-end hours are still hours

But still, what's worse than dying rich? Dying poor, and while traditional media traditionally looks down its nose at the likes of YouTube, someone colliding with a bridge abutment at highway speeds will die in exactly the same way regardless how many A-list blockbusters are on that person's IMDb listing. Small productions are much more likely to be pushed for time, shooting in cheaper and thus more distant places, lacking unit drivers, and less likely to want to put people up in hotels. Sometimes, depending on the laws that exist in various places, people may find themselves using their private vehicles for work in ways that mean they're actually uninsured, and the least experienced workers are also likely to feel least able to say no.

As such, while most jurisdictions make everyone equally responsible for behaving safely, independent producers (who are likely to be independent writer-producer-directors) are at particular risk of creating safety problems. If you ask someone to work sixteen hours, which, let's not forget, is the equivalent of two normal workdays, if that person dies on the way home, you bear a measure of responsibility. These issues impact a lot of people the unions often overlook out of something that looks very much like snobbery, notwithstanding the fact that some YouTube channels are essentially indistinguishable from television production companies and produce very legitimate material.

Carelessness around ab-initio workers who will form the core of the next generation is arguably why there’s a crew shortage in the first place; training has been poorly handled for years. Worse, without proper guidance, new entrants are likely to have early experiences which normalise exactly the kind of problems the unions are concerned about. As so often, unions seem to be interested primarily in looking after people who are already fairly well looked-after. Any long term solution must engage properly with people in entry-level positions.