10.6: Labor Struggles, Accommodations, and Strategies of Survival
-
- Last updated
- Save as PDF
- Huan Piñón
- University of California Press
Creative professionals face an array of challenges in their mostly unstable work settings across the region. These involve a lack of steady jobs and an absence of work benefits such as health insurance, retirement funds, paid vacations, and maternity leave. Most workers are nonunionized, and their employers are themselves subordinate to the power of national networks and multinational conglomerates. Both workers and management sense the precariousness of their situation. Their only leverage resides in the growing demand for content and the fierce competition for talent. Given that, the relationship between these rather small business entities and their creative labor is shaped by complex and intertwined conditions of professionalism, emotional attachment, creative styles, and in many cases “family”-style ties and relationships.
There are several sizes and modalities of production indies bring to the audiovisual realm. Many houses produce advertising and corporate and institutional content as a way to maintain a healthy income. They also keep their payrolls trim, commonly anchored by three to ten permanent office employees and a network of freelance creatives. Indies typically rely on the prestige and connections of particular professionals, mostly the producers themselves. So, while a company might be initially founded by a famous actor, director, writer, producer, or venture capitalist, most commonly its ongoing operations are led by a producer who is the owner, co-owner, or CEO of the company.
While varying in size, indies nevertheless tend to have similar staffing patterns. They routinely hire administrative personnel for the office, including accountants, administrators, secretaries, and office assistants. In larger companies, especially those producing fictional programming, there is also a second group of permanent employees, mostly technicians and manual laborers. In some cases, there is an editor on staff and a few other below-the-line professionals who enjoy permanent contracts and legal benefits such as health benefits, retirement funds, vacations, and compensation in case of a layoff. Yet they employ mostly a nonunionized workforce.
When launching a particular project, the company hires above-the-line creative professionals on temporary contracts at higher wages but with no legal benefits. These professionals are nonunionized, and although many are paid quite well, their work stints are unpredictable, punctuated by regular periods of unemployment without benefits. These professionals include writers, directors, actors, photographers, casting experts, art and costume designers, and many others. They constitute a floating labor force that offers its services either to independent producers or to fill the needs of network in-house production teams on particular projects. However, there are some working conditions that vary by country. In Mexico, freelance laborers take care of their individual health expenses and save for retirement. In Uruguay, individuals are hired through a personnel company that provides benefits, while in Colombia workers have benefits via payroll.
In terms of stability, freelancers are in the most vulnerable position, always pursuing the next gig by offering their services to multiple clients in different audiovisual sectors. At the same time, some workers embrace the flexibility and freedom of being able to change jobs and negotiate working conditions. An executive producer from the Uruguayan indie house Microtime argues, “There are professionals who prefer a freelance status because that allows them to manage their lives. They take vacations when they want. They do not want to ask permission from their boss, producer, and that kind of flexibility works very well for them.” 44 At the same time, this kind of freedom comes with a downside: according to an Argos screenwriter, “I cannot plan my life more than two or three months in advance. If I have earned money from a project, I need to save and take care until I find the next one.” 45 Interviewees explained that forging a good professional reputation is essential to keeping themselves in the labor force. Intelligence, talent, technical and artistic abilities, and work ethic are considered to be essential elements for survival. Work continuity and stability are linked to gaining the producers’ trust.
Interestingly, the small number of highly visible indie productions and their small size tend to create tight relationships within professional circles. Work relations are permeated with emotional ties and a sense of common artistic purpose. Some executive producers from indie houses refer to their permanent staff members and regular freelancers as family, saying they want to take care of professionals who have worked with them for a long time by offering a sense of stability. An artistic director from Del Barrio says it’s “because we know that these workers have families, and they have worked for us too many years. So, yes, there is an emotional element.” 46 Thus, just as emotional and pecuniary relations are intertwined, so too is the artistic sensibility that permeates some of the indie shops. This is often described as a common outlook on how television should be made, a shared understanding in the realm of either aesthetics or ideology. As opposed to the conventions of in-house network productions, these creative teams believe that indie shops are the perfect space to make something different. The professional profiles of the leading indie producers seem to permeate the institutional culture of their production houses, creating personal bonds around common artistic goals, including innovation and brand distinctiveness that set them apart from the dominant network studios.