Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 23:

In page 71, between lines 25 and 26, to insert the following: “(4) Within 3 months of the passing of this Act, the Minister will produce a report on how he or she intends to implement the other recommendations in the budgetary oversight committee report in section 481, particularly those regarding ensuring quality employment and training, so as to ensure—

(a) an end to the use of buy-out and other inferior contracts for actors, writers, directors and performers;

(b) compliance with the EU copyright directives and legislation;

(c) the excessive use of fixed-term contracts and the lack of recognition of service for film crew;

(d) the need for film producer companies to take direct responsibility for their employees; and

(e) the urgent convening of an all-inclusive stakeholder forum to address these and other outstanding issues in the film industry.”.

I have a couple of comments to make and questions to ask that I would like the Minister to answer. It is up to him obviously but I would appreciate it. In response to the Chair's contribution, I would like to say that there is no question, from any of those who are putting forward these amendments, of anybody trying to talk down the Irish film industry. Rather, what we want to see is a thriving film industry with more investment and more output, and which also does right by the incredible pool of talent we have. I really want to underline that point. We have an incredible pool of talent in terms of actors, writers, directors, performers, stage crew and many others.

The idea that the status quois what the majority of them want is just not tenable. I met recently with representatives of Equity, and the writers and directors. None of them are not happy with the status quo. That is a pretty big group of people, and pretty critical to the development of the industry.

On the crew, there was a reference to an agreement with 300 workers. The first thing the Minister needs to understand about those workers, regardless of what he may have said, is that structurally speaking they are completely vulnerable. Forget about who said what when, or who did what where. Structurally speaking, they do not have any protection against their employment being simply terminated.

For the Minister's information, I asked Screen Producers Ireland, on behalf of film crew, how many film crews in the film industry have ever got a contract of indefinite duration. The answer was "none". That is a pretty startling fact when one thinks of the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003, which is in the declaration that the film producers who receive the section 481 have to sign. They have to indicate that they are willing to comply with all relevant employment legislation, and that includes the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act. What they told the Committee on Budgetary Oversight is that it is not possible to give contracts of indefinite duration because of the nature of the industry. However, they signed a thing saying they are.

The whole point about the fixed-term workers directive and the fixed-term workers legislation is to prevent the abuse of successive use of fixed-term contracts. That is the whole point of the legislation. If somebody is telling us it cannot apply in the Irish film industry, that is a pretty serious matter. It is an unacceptable issue that we are being told by the people who receive the relief that it is not possible for people to receive contracts of indefinite duration. I remind the Minister that this is an issue we have seen emerge in RTÉ. We have seen in front of our eyes the whole question of people who have been working again and again taking cases, bogus self-employment and so on. There is an echo of that in the film industry. People were working for RTÉ for years but were deemed not to be employees, even though they obviously were employees.

It is slightly more complicated than the film industry but the basic point applies. Let us say that one works on a well-known television series that one can see on Netflix. Without identifying it too closely, it has had six different series, was filmed here, and is about an earlier point in European history. Let us put it that way. It is a fairly popular series. One may have worked on three, four or five of those series, and then all of a sudden, one is not re-employed for the sixth. One is not told why but one just does not get re-employed. They have been filmed over ten years, or whatever. One takes a case and says, "I have been unfairly dismissed here. I should have been returned for series six. I worked on the five series beforehand". There was no disciplinary procedure or warnings, or the normal processes one would get if one was being dismissed. One is just not being re-employed. When one takes a case about that, the employer who receives section 481 does not come in to the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, because they claim they are not the respondent. They claim that person is not their employee, even though that company set up the designated activity companies, DACs, that made all of those series.

Is that not a problem? To me, that is a systemic and structural problem that is not about whether there is an agreement or not between construction crew and Screen Producers Ireland, SPI. It is a problem in and of itself regarding the failure to vindicate rights that those employees clearly have. I believe the Minister has the power to impose conditions on section 481 that would prevent that abuse from happening. It is a case of Russian dolls. It is obvious that the producer who received the money, which is the same company that sought the relief for those six films but has six different DACs, even though it is the same series, is hiding behind the DAC. It is in order to evade their responsibility to that employee, to deprive them of due process, putting them in a position to terminate that employee's employment without any due process whatsoever.

Regarding the body representing that particular employee, along with about 40 or 50 others who are in the same position, it is worth saying that what happened between the last series he was employed on and the one where his employment was terminated was that his representatives came into an Oireachtas committee and complained about the treatment of workers in the industry.

All the people represented by that group have not worked in the industry again or were forced to abandon membership of that particular group.