A group of film set workers who were blacklisted for raising contract concerns and who called two leading Irish film producers “morally bankrupt” as they accused them of committing systematic employment law breaches have secured tens of thousands of euro each.
The Workplace Relations Commission has made public an initial tranche of decisions awarding €434,216 to some members of the Irish Film Workers’ Association (IFWA) who complained en masse two years ago.
The figure may yet rise as the tribunal processes and releases its decisions on further statutory complaints by those workers and their fellow union members, which are expected to come in the days ahead.
Nearly 40 members of the breakaway trade union accused the producers and their associated entities of breaching the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 by failing to honour their statutory right to a permanent contract after four years’ service and of penalising them for challenging the situation.
The union had said its campaigning against “systematic blacklisting” in the Irish film industry led to the men losing jobs they had held for decades in companies controlled by Morgan O’Sullivan and the late James Flynn.
The workers registered complaints against two entities, World 2000 Entertainment Ltd and Metropolitan Film Productions Ltd, stating that they were employed by the companies, of which the two producers were the “principal directors”.
The respondent companies were the parents of a series of designated activity companies (DACs) and special-purpose vehicles set up for tax relief on film and TV productions in Ireland in recent years, including ‘Vikings’ on Amazon Prime and ‘Into the Badlands’ on AMC, the Workplace Relations Commission was told.
Representatives of the Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation (IBEC) who appeared for the producers at hearings in 2022 and 2023 denied the workers were ever direct employees of the firms – but had instead been hired in from film to film by the designated activity companies.
The WRC has rejected that argument and made the orders for compensation against Metropolitan Films International Ltd, a group entity it found was the ultimate employer.
Not only had many of the workers been entitled to assert their entitlement to a contract of indefinite duration, a number of them were penalised with dismissal for doing so, adjudication officer Catherine Byrne concluded.
In 13 of the cases decided so far, Ms Byrne ordered Metropolitan Films International Ltd to pay each of the workers €5,000 in compensation for the failure to provide a written statement setting out the reasons for employing them on a specified purpose contract in breach of the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act, 2003.
Ten of those workers have also received €25,000 for penalisation by way of dismissal for attempting to assert their entitlement to a fixed-term contract.
The tribunal has also made orders of four weeks’ wages per worker for breaches of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act for the failure to provide the complainants with compliant contractual statements, with the awards ranging from €5,000 to €9,000 made to 18 workers so far.
One of those awarded the €30,000 for breaches of the Protection of Employees Act, plasterer William Hanlon, told the WRC he was “blackballed for a couple of months on the strength of questioning the behaviour of a supervisor”.
“If you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, act in a particular way…you would be gently put aside,” he said.
Mr Hanlon said IFWA became “a dirty name” in the workplace after an appearance before the Oireachtas by IFWA shop steward John Arkins’ in 2018.
The union argued that Mr Arkins’ appearance before the Oireachtas Culture Committee to air grievances led to the penalisation of the whole group of workers.
“There was certain people of a higher rank saying: ‘Don’t join it [IFWA], it’s gonna cost you work,’” he said.
In submissions on one of the claims, one IBEC industrial relations executive said the DACs were “in no way a circumvention of employment rights” calling the film business “a freelance industry, not just for cast and crew, but for producers too”.
As the last of the cases was being heard this summer, IFWA organiser Liz Murray, for the workers, said of the arguments being advanced by IBEC: “Not only are [they] flagrantly disrespectful to the complainant, they are flagrantly disrespectful of this tribunal. It ill becomes any professional representative body to engage in such chicanery.”
“It is clear from the claims being made in the written submissions tendered on their behalf that they are morally bankrupt. They could identify the workers clearly when they were looking to fleece them out of hard-earned wages,” she said.
It was the end of lengthy careers in film for most of the members, some of them identifying productions including Angela’s Ashes and the Count of Monte Cristo in the 1990s as their first film jobs with the respondents – though some told the tribunal their service went back as long as four decades.
Workers described moving on to become full-time carers, driving taxis for a living, and going into business for themselves in the construction trade.
The decisions amount to a reversal of course by the WRC after it rejected jurisdiction in six initial test cases ruled on in 2022, when it decided the complainants were too late to bring claims.
Adjudicator Catherine Byrne had previously ruled the IFWA members should have known they were not being brought back to work early in 2019, soon enough to bring complaints within the required six-month statutory window.
Ms Byrne heard the balance of the claims one by one over the course of several months in 2023 and wrote that her view had changed on foot of new evidence which emerged in the later hearings.
She said she had assumed in an earlier case taken by the shop steward, Mr Arkins, that he should have known sooner than December 2019 that there was no work for him, when in fact Metropolitan had no film productions running until November 2019 and that it only became apparent to the IFWA members that they were not being called back for work when shooting began for Ridley Scott’s ‘The Last Duel’ that month.
That meant Mr Arkins had the right to pursue further statutory complaints lodged in January 2020, although the Labour Court has already rejected his appeal of the earlier case.
She also determined that although the workers had named various corporate entities in their complaints, she was satisfied that Metropolitan Films International Ltd was the correct respondent.
She added that the workers could be forgiven for not knowing “precisely the correct, legal name” of their employer as they were focused on challenging the “false proposition” that they had been employed by a series of DACs, she added.
