The Coronavirus Is Hurting Film Crew Members, And There's No End In Sight

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I worked as a production assistant and "background artist" on several productions, so I feel the pain of the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of people who are currently in that position, finding themselves without work as their productions shut down. Most of the film and TV industry's workers are essentially glorified day players who are often classified as as part-time employees who regularly put in above average work weeks but don't receive benefits or paid sick leave. They're nomads, and the lucky ones jump from one project to the next in order to meet union requirements for insurance. It's a tenuous job even in the best of times, and the effects of the coronavirus have already been devastating.

While the recent boom in scripted content seems great in theory (more jobs!), it has occasionally meant that, even before the coronavirus outbreak, those jobs were lowering their wages for workers, making life more difficult for many of these employees – a lot of whom are already living paycheck to paycheck. Now, tons of workers are left in a state of uncertainty: not only are productions shutting down and possibly not resuming at all, but these workers don't know whether the federal government or the individual studios or production companies they work for will come through for them in this dire time of need.

But while no official plans have been put in place yet, it seems discussions are happening right now about how to move forward. Variety says that the growing consensus appears to be "that crew members who are not under long-term contract to a given production will receive at least two-to-three weeks of "straight time" paychecks, or a 40-hour week." According to Variety:

Multiple sources said Disney's sprawling TV group was looking at three weeks of pay as a starting point. Warner Bros. is believed to have committed to two weeks of full pay for full-time employees who have been furloughed amid the shutdowns, including tour guides and food service workers. It's not clear if that policy will extend to production crew staffers. Netflix is said to have committed to a minimum of two weeks of pay for crews in the U.S. and Canada on the shows that the internet behemoth produces in-house, such as "Stranger Things.""

But while that may be a good starting point for some, those payments won't come close to being equivalent to what many of those workers would normally make, because crew members often work 60 to 100-hour work weeks at the peak of the year. And what happens after those checks for two or three weeks of 40-hour pay are issued? The future isn't exactly rosy.