The strike is on.
After days of tense discussions, we are able to affirm that the collective French movie pageant employees we first reported final week have set plans to mount a widespread strike motion throughout this 12 months’s Cannes Movie Competition over pay.
The group, often known as the Collectif des précaires des festivals de cinéma (which interprets to The Collective of Precarious Employees at Movie Festivals), confirmed their plans this morning with an open letter despatched to Deadline. Scroll down to learn the total letter.
“In a context of utmost vulnerability and absolute emergency to guard our work, and after session and vote of the members of the collective, we name for a strike of all workers of the Cannes Movie Competition and its sidebars,” the group stated.
The collective consists of as much as 200 French movie pageant employees — a mix of Cannes employees, together with those that work on the Official Choice, the pageant’s Marché du Movie, and parallel sections of Administrators’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week — and employees from different festivals throughout France. Potential strikers embrace pageant projectionists, press officers, and admin employees. The group has but to substantiate how lengthy or when their strike motion will occur. However we perceive they’re consulting CGT Spectacle, the French Federation of Leisure, Cinema, Audiovisual and Cultural Motion Unions, on technique.
The group’s strike motion is the results of two central points. They’re first rallying in opposition to the pay packages they obtain from their employers, which they are saying are insufficient and sometimes don’t account for arduous extra time hours steadily clocked because of the calls for of their jobs.
The second bone of competition is France’s distinctive unemployment insurance coverage program for leisure employees and technicians. Referred to as Intermittence de Spectacle, the scheme helps leisure employees on short-term contracts with an unemployment profit when they’re between jobs or initiatives. Resulting from distinctive rules, many employees at French movie festivals are excluded from the unemployment profit. As a substitute, they’re employed and handed flat short-term contracts. The collective is campaigning to now be included within the scheme citing the inherent seasonal nature of the work.
“We demand that the organizations which make use of us be affiliated to a collective settlement permitting us to be employed underneath the standing of intermittent present enterprise employees and that our positions be built-in into the unemployment profit system,” right this moment’s open letter stated.
Deadline has reached out to the pageant for remark.
Cannes runs Might 14—25.
Open Letter
For a 12 months now, we, members of the Sous les écrans la dèche (Broke Behind the Screens) collective, have been warning in regards to the rising precariousness of the folks working in movie festivals.
We go from short-term missions to durations of unemployment and regardless of the intermittent nature of our occupation and our striving for the circulation of cinematographic work, our exercise doesn’t fall inside the French intermittent standing profit plan for present enterprise employees!
The most recent reforms of unemployment advantages in France and the one scheduled for July 1st of this 12 months, which will likely be handed by decree, is additional hardening the profit guidelines for employment seekers.
These reforms are throwing pageant employees in such precariousness that almost all of us must hand over our jobs, thus jeopardizing the occasions we participate in.
Due to this fact, we demand that the organizations that make use of us be affiliated to a collective settlement permitting us to be employed underneath the standing of present enterprise employee’s intermittence and that our positions be built-in into the unemployment profit system, retroactive to the final 18 months.
Our warnings and calls for have been obtained with well mannered consideration to date, however no concrete measure has been supplied by the CNC or the Ministry of Tradition. That’s the reason the upcoming opening of the Cannes Competition is leaving us with a bitter style.
In a context of utmost vulnerability and absolute emergency to guard our work, and after session and vote of the members of the collective, we name for a strike of all workers of the Cannes Movie Competition and of its sidebars.
Sous les écrans la dèche collective