Benzinga: Two of Canada's top media and entertainment unions announced an innovative partnership today to improve working conditions and organize workers in factual/reality television.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), North America's largest entertainment union, is joining forces with media union CWA Canada in its Fairness in Factual TV campaign.
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It is so good to hear about how strong unions are in our industry even internationally. I might eventually want to work in other countries and it is good to read about how unions are strong not just in the American theatre industry. It is also really good to hear that the union is trying to update itself as the industry is changing. It shows that the unions are in tune with their workers and the world of today and just old nepotistic agencies. This article has been extremely eye-opening as well. I didn’t know there was a different treatment of unions depending on the type of television show. This makes sense but I hope factual/reality TV workers start getting better treatment. I also can’t believe how even now there is still such abuse over people’s intellectual property. This drives home the point that even if we’ve (as an industry) won the rights doesn’t me that we can stop fighting.
This article has made me curious about how the needs of reality TV crew vary from the needs of scripted TV crew. While I imagine there are differences due to the fact that the content of reality tv is more unexpected and therefore you need to be ready for whatever happens, I wouldn’t have imagined there’d be much difference in terms of pay, worker treatment, and similar. I’m curious how the reality TV contracts developed after the union gets involved will compare to scripted TV contracts. Separately, I’m now curious about the difference between reality TV and factual TV. Maybe factual TV is just the term for it in Canada, but I could also see it be referring to something entirely different or be an umbrella term that includes things like documentaries as well. Factual TV sounds much more legitimate to me than reality TV, but that could be just because I have a mental image of reality TV already whereas I have no associations with the term factual TV.
I would be interested to learn more about the problems faced by people who work on reality shows, and about the contracts that enable independent contractors to work alongside union members. I get the sense that the non-union workers are willing to work without proper breaks and overtime, which puts pressure on union members to do the same. I do not know much about how the IA functions in the film and television industry, but I would think that, similar to live entertainment, if someone is doing a job parallel or equivalent to the job a union member is doing, that person needs to be an employee of the union. It can be frustrating to a non-member to be limited by seniority and other factors preventing them from working in particular situations. That said, if a worker has specific training, they will get called to do jobs that require that training. In this particular case, it seems like the contracts need to be adjusted such that they require everyone to follow the same rules.
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