{"id":4370,"date":"2021-10-18T22:00:24","date_gmt":"2021-10-19T02:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4370"},"modified":"2021-10-21T23:13:29","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T03:13:29","slug":"how-iatse-got-strike-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/10\/how-iatse-got-strike-ready\/","title":{"rendered":"How IATSE got strike ready"},"content":{"rendered":"

H\u00e9ctor A. Rivera:<\/span> Can you tell us about the working conditions that are leading to this strike? It sounds like these complaints are not new. Why are IATSE workers ready to strike now?<\/p>\n

Spring Super:<\/span> There are a lot of different conditions that are creating a perfect storm of discontent. The conditions greatly depend on who you are and your job. The conditions that I experience as a make-up artist aren\u2019t as bad as say the conditions that a production assistant would experience. But if you\u2019re \u201cabove the line,\u201d your experience can be much better.<\/p>\n

I primarily work as a makeup artist on episodic television shows. The shooting schedules can be a matter of a few months to 9-10 months out of the year. During shooting time we basically don\u2019t see our families or have lives outside of work. The average work day is 12 hours, five days a week, and we often go over 12 hours. We also do not get very much time in between days to sleep and see our families, take care of the things we have to take care of, doctor\u2019s appointments, etc. There is no time for anything else during the week. We don\u2019t even have enough time to get to and from work and get a full eight hours of sleep.<\/p>\n

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Source: IATSE instagram<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That\u2019s a big part of what the negotiations are about. We are asking for more turnaround time between the end-of-day Monday and start-of-day on Tuesday, for example. We\u2019re asking for enough time to get enough rest and take care of other things, like showering, preparing our meals, taking our children to school, whatever it is. There\u2019s no time for any of that, so our lives sort of fall apart if we don\u2019t have somebody else to help maintain it. The person that helps maintain all of those things, they also have a double burden of maintaining your life on top of their own. It trickles down to your family, friends, social life and especially your physical and mental health, because you\u2019re not able to make doctor\u2019s appointments.<\/p>\n

The long hours are also a serious health and safety problem because we\u2019re wrapping really late after working 12 plus hours. We\u2019re all very tired when we are wrapping and that can consist of driving home too tired to drive safely. There have been many car accidents, there have been deaths, and the list can go on. The conditions that we\u2019re shooting in are sometimes not hygienic or safe, like shooting on streets and train tracks that have live traffic, like people having to run for their lives to literally avoid being hit by a train. An IATSE crew member, Sarah Jones<\/a> was hit and killed by a train in 2014. That sparked a movement for more safety and oversight in the industry and since then I think people have pushed for safer working conditions.<\/p>\n

Another thing that happens is something called \u201cFraturdays,\u201d which is when they start shooting so late in the day on Friday that you don\u2019t wrap until sometime Saturday morning so now your weekend has been encroached upon and you\u2019re likely going to be called in early on Monday morning. So you don\u2019t even get all of your Saturday.<\/p>\n

There are also discrepancies in pay all over the place. For example, production assistants are usually paid minimum wage, and PAs are the worker bees, they do so much work. And they\u2019re not in a union. They are hired to help manage all the logistics of the day and they make everything happen as it\u2019s supposed to. They are often young and aspiring crew members that hope to someday be in the union, but they have to get a certain number of days under their belt before they can join the union. So they do this low paid work, they work the longest hours, they\u2019re treated worse than other departments, and they are not allowed to sit down. It\u2019s definitely a big part of the culture, you see them standing up and if they sit down, they pop up when one of their bosses comes. The saying is \u201ca good PA never sits down\u201d. So just to sit down a PA has to take a bathroom break, and there are stories of PAs having to stand so long and who take bathroom breaks just to warm up and get off their feet.<\/p>\n

People find ways to sleep at work because they\u2019re not sleeping at home. People\u2019s mental health and social skills deteriorate towards the end of the week. People are fried, irritable, exhausted and not as productive and not as capable of taking on stressful situations, and that\u2019s when you start to see the mean side of people that comes out in the industry. That is a big part of it. There is a lot of gaslighting that keeps people accepting these conditions and not trying to challenge them. We\u2019re told that it has always been this way, which isn\u2019t true. I\u2019ve been talking to fellow IATSE members that have been in the union for 30 years and they say they remember a time when it wasn\u2019t like this. So something has happened alongside the deterioration of unions in this country, and that\u2019s how this has played out in our industry.<\/p>\n

HAR:<\/span> How are race and ethnicity connected to this strike? What impact, if any, have BLM protests had on your co-workers?<\/p>\n

SS:<\/span> This question is awesome. It\u2019s something that hasn\u2019t been really talked about. The BLM protests are like a precursor that gave people a place to express some of their discontent. A lot of issues came out during the pandemic and the protests when organizations were forced to look at whether their systems and protocols had bias or were racist, and they were challenged to look at that and make changes and our industry was one of them.<\/p>\n

We created diversity committees and through that we were able to see the ways that racism and discrimination were playing out. And that whole experience sparked people to get involved, get political and share their thoughts on what\u2019s going on. Through that, all of the other issues that we’re facing in our workplaces also started to come up. I think that the success of the Black Lives Matter movement\u2014the success of just being able to now talk about politics at work, whether it’s racism or the conditions at work\u2014I think that’s getting more normalized. So, it was sort of a natural flow that the next thing we start to talk about are the conditions at work and organizing around that.<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s a level of confidence that people have, and some of that has come out of the connection we made building solidarity among our membership through the diversity committees. We now have a diversity and inclusion committee at the national level in IATSE and many locals have created their own. There weren\u2019t many before and through that wildfire of committees popping up, I think we inspired our leadership to legitimize what we\u2019re doing by creating a national committee and taking on some of the work that we were all doing as small locals. We\u2019ve made a difference.<\/p>\n