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The Chronicle Herald: A lot of raw emotion — strong words, bad feelings and harsh accusations — has surrounded the very public and personal battle between Halifax commercial and video production house Egg Films Inc. and Local 849 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Beneath all of the heated debate and the concept idea of unionizing or not, the crux of the problem is the individuals employees or independent contractors. My problem surrounding the continuing debate of the issue is that no one is benefitting from the lack of continuing work that has resulted from the boycott and stalled communications. Egg claims to have paid the single-day contractors more money than their union equivalents, and if this is true then the problem must lie in the face that the union rate does not allow for the fact that Egg must now pay taxes for the employees, which will increase their overall cost per worker. If it does account for this change, then I do not see how exactly this change impacts the company as a whole. Halifax already uses union workers on their larger projects, but for some reason the one-day engagements have been up for debate for more than a year.
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Beneath all of the heated debate and the concept idea of unionizing or not, the crux of the problem is the individuals employees or independent contractors. My problem surrounding the continuing debate of the issue is that no one is benefitting from the lack of continuing work that has resulted from the boycott and stalled communications. Egg claims to have paid the single-day contractors more money than their union equivalents, and if this is true then the problem must lie in the face that the union rate does not allow for the fact that Egg must now pay taxes for the employees, which will increase their overall cost per worker. If it does account for this change, then I do not see how exactly this change impacts the company as a whole. Halifax already uses union workers on their larger projects, but for some reason the one-day engagements have been up for debate for more than a year.
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