Collective Bargaining

Collective bargaining

The core policy goal of FSE has been to facilitate and encourage more extensive collective bargaining by screenwriters’ guilds and unions throughout Europe.

The establishment of minimum terms and conditions of employment – complete with minimum rates of remuneration – by Collective Bargaining with organisations of independent producers and with broadcasters, has the potential to change the inequitable and inefficient system of individual negotiation and consequent exploitation of the work of screenwriters.

Both at the development stage – when resources are often limited – and in negotiations for purchase of rights at the production stage, individual screenwriters are in an impossibly weak bargaining position with their contractual counterparts.

The role of national and regional Film Institutes and European programmes – which fund producers for film project development costs – is important in this respect.

This weak bargaining position of creators was recognised by the European Commission in its initial studies and in its impact assessment, leading it to propose a series of changes to the contractual provision of authors as a key component of the Copyright Directive.

Based on experience in Germany, the Copyright Directive now also suggests that the proposed changes to creators’ contracts might best be managed by Collective Bargaining.

Facilitating such bargaining, both at EU level and at national and regional level, will be the key policy priority of FSE over the next years.

Competition law

A problematic issue for creators’ organisations intending to collectively bargain is the clash between collective bargaining and competition law.

Screenwriters are overwhelmingly freelance and in some jurisdictions in the European Union would be considered to be undertakings for the purpose of Competition law. Consequently, their collective bargaining can be misconstrued as price fixing and outlawed by Competition law.

This has led to action being taken by Competition Authorities in three separate member states – Netherlands, Spain and Ireland – in the last decade or so. In each of these member states, new legislation has since been introduced to try to allow collective bargaining by creators, suggesting a wide recognition that facilitating collective bargaining by creators is more socially useful than the application of a narrow and rigid interpretation of Competition principles in a way that brings those principles into disrepute.

Other member states (United Kingdom and Germany, for instance) either tolerate or formally legislate for collective bargaining by creators.

The matter has now been directly addressed by the new Copyright Directive, which explicitly promotes collective bargaining as a possible solution to the need for transparency and for the application of proportionate remuneration.

This policy issue, long a concern of the FSE, will now be brought more precisely into focus by the implementation of the Copyright Directive at national level.