Imagine a TV industry that didn’t run on freelancers — Paul Evans’ industry blog

Directors UK are among the voices calling for the establishment of a Freelance Commissioner to deal with the crisis facing many workers from across the creative industries. 

If this role is established, a useful day-one exercise could be to find out how much freelancers are really worth by imagining a world in which self-employment is not an option.  

There’s no doubt in my mind that the entrepreneurial success of above-the-line creative players is driven by their freelance status, but imagine – as a thought experiment - if that were to change dramatically and every film and TV programme were suddenly made using 100% permanent employees instead of freelancers.

And imagine that that these permanent staff were expected to move around dozens of productions that the company was engaged in.  
If this happened, an industry-wide HR and skills strategy would appear very quickly. Skills retention would suddenly become a priority. Before appointments were made, there would be some rigorous due diligence - CVs would actually be read and interviews held. Careful induction processes would start to be a thing.  

Training – skills development – would suddenly be recognised as a good investment. Head-hunters would get very busy poaching directors, in particular, and, as a result directors’ wages would be in a race to the top, and not (as we sometimes see in lower-budget areas) to the bottom.

Employers would develop concerns about the productivity of the crews. Long working days in drama and unscripted would be avoided wherever possible because practically every management study ever published shows us that exhausted teams achieve less than they would if they were managed well.  

In a sector as reliant on direct creative labour as ours, the most successful companies would be the ones who know what all of their employees bring to their enterprise, and how to build that value. They’d also know the value directors add to a story, and to a script and to the performances that lie dormant within actors and reporters.

If they didn’t, it would sink their businesses.  

I’m not saying we need to move all directors onto permanent contracts of course – but let’s contrast that with the very different reality of a reliance on freelancers.  

It’s only possible for a sector to become as reliant as ours is on freelancers if business, industry, society and ultimately the Government is prepared to allow it to ‘externalise’ a lot of its labour costs.  

Externalised costs is a fancy economists’ way of saying “you get someone else to pay for it.” The willingness is always there to build capacity in the creative industries, but because freelance survival is dependent upon an investment in developing and maintaining skills, this cost also gets externalised onto their freelancers who know that they need to move with the times.  

Our industry’s unusual approach to working hours in drama is another example of this. Production staffing was once described to me as a game of ‘pass the exhausted parcel.’ The cost of recovering from long periods of 12+ hour days is externalised onto the workers themselves, and their families, but also onto the next production company that hires the crew in question.

Our industry has been allowed to treat all the challenges other sectors face as ‘someone else’s problem.’ By using freelancers, production companies can avoid the need to have much by way of middle-management that is fully across what their crews do.

Instead, they can get by without this expensive layer of administrators because freelance teams often come together with very little on-boarding. “There is no HR department really – just a glorified payroll function” is the constant refrain.

Leaving everything else aside, this general approach is almost completely antithetical to any efforts to make our industry more diverse or inclusive. 

It also serves the craft of directors worse than any other part of the production.  

Economists know that, when the contribution a worker makes to an end-product is very obvious, it makes it easier for them to bargain for reasonable wages and status.

But, crucially, the preference for freelancers means that companies don’t hire people to evaluate and procure skills in the first place. A good director may be the factor that turns a flat concept into a hard-hitting documentary or a dazzling story. They may find hugely economical ways of telling the story, but when they do…. who notices? Not enough people, if you ask me.  

This is why it’s so important to communicate the value of what directors do. 

So, my question – in conclusion – is this: 

How can the greatest storytellers in the history of the world help us at Directors UK to demonstrate – to the people who hire them – the contribution they make to the greatest stories that history has ever known? 

If directors fail to tell that story well, all of the other stories that the public want them to tell will suffer. 

Paul Evans is Head of Industry Relations at Directors UK. In this regular blog Paul shares his thoughts on the industry, as he meets and collaborates with directors across the UK. Read Paul’s previous blog: “The holidays are over. But did you get enough holiday pay?”.