Unions - What They Give Us (Another Look)

Waaaay back in August (well, that’s way back in Internet time, even faster than dog years) I wrote a post about unions, and why I like them.  The gist of the article was this: though there are certainly excesses, what the entertainment unions like IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, which represents most of the below-the-line types in the film industry in the U.S.) do for us is to create a larger power with the people who are signing our checks than we could ever have separately. Part of this has to do with forcing employers to respect our non-work times and part of it has to do with forcing them to provide for our health insurance in a country where our government does not.

But there’s more, and I’ll get to that in just a minute.  But first, an aside.

Yesterday, I got in the mail a ballot for my vote on the new Editors Guild contract, with provisions in it that are so controversial that the board felt the need to attach a two-page letter describing why they feel it is important to vote yes, despite a change in the way health benefits are offered, a New Media clause that is good but not as forward-thinking as some might have liked, and a very small pay increase. The leadership admits that they weren’t able to get everything they wanted but that, in the present economic meltdown, they feel that this is a realistic deal. By far, one of the most interesting parts of the cover letter, however, is the phrase that “there is no dynamic in the workplace that goes unmirrored on the Board,” meaning that they represent people who work a lot as well as people who are struggling horribly. Just like the rest of us. Regardless of my opinion of the contract (I’m voting for it, by the way, but I still think it leaves way too much future revenue on the table) this letter backs up what I said in my last post about unions — it’s about providing a singular voice to a group of people who are very unsingular.

But, now let’s get back on track.

One complaint that’s always voiced about unions is that they make it difficult to create films — what with grips refusing to adjust lights, and other people refusing to move furniture.  “Everybody should be able to do everything on a set,” I hear. And, while it may be impossible on micro-budget films to separate many of these tasks among different people, most of these tasks remain anyway. One of the most difficult things for my students at USC to wrap their minds around is how to collaborate effectively. It’s easy to talk with an editor, when you are the editor as well the director.  It’s easy when you’re the d.p. and the costume designer and the production designer and the sound recordist, etc. etc. etc. But, at a certain point, it means that you’re not going to be able to work with your actors as quickly or effectively if you don’t have someone to run to the hardware store to get that black-out paper that you need for your lighting. It pays to have someone to be mic-ing up your actor, while someone else is lighting, while the director is actually helping to refine the performances.  And that means that people are going to have to learn to collaborate.

But the system breaks down is the person who is doing the lighting turns around to look for the person who has been asked to help him/her and finds that the person has been sent off to bring a prop table onto the set. The lighting then takes way longer. Or if the person who is doing props is asked to help run cables for the lighting, then when the actor wants to rehearse with the actual scalpel that he/she will be using in the set — that actor is going to have to sit colling his/her heels.

So, division  of labor is a good thing in general, for nearly all films — but it is one of the first things that goes out the window when the budget crunch comes along.  It also means that there are lots of times when someone who really hasn’t been trained to hang lights is asked to do that — because “we don’t have anyone else to do it.”  The end result — they hang the lights wrong, something falls and who knows what happens with that.  I like to describe this situation with a triangle:

I like to tell the producers or directors who I work with that “I can give you two points of this triangle. Which one do you want to give up?” It puts it in stark perspective — asking to do something cheaply is going to affect either how well or how fast you do it. If you want me to run cables, while working props — you either do without the right prop, or give me extra non-shooting time to do both.

Unions, it occurs to me, help to drum that point home (as well as all of the other things that they do). They help reinforce the idea that no one person is a Master of All Trades and that there are tradeoffs to treating them as if they are. Unions educate, as well as protect.

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Another thing that the Editors Guild does is provide a place where we can learn from each other and to that end, they publish a fantastic magazine. Years ago, Steve Cohen, of Splice Here, took the magazine’s professionalism up several notches and I began writing a column in which I interviewed editors in depth about scenes from movies that they had just cut (archives of that series — The View From The Cutting Room Ceiling — can be found on my old website).

The latest issue will be available up at the Editors Guild website very very soon and includes an article by me, in which I interview Jason Steward, the editor of the new film WORLD’S GREATEST DAD, who I had the great fortune of meeting up at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. We talk about the increasing number of tasks that an editor is required to do in today’s modern editing room, a subject which I also covered in this blog post called “Does The Editor Have A Future?”

Jason is incredibly articulate and very very interesting.  I’d recommend surfing over there and hunting for the article very soon.  It appears in the March/April 2009 issue.