JobKeeper ended and the screen industry is counting who is left

JobKeeper ends on 28 March. The screen industry knows this. What it does not know, and what nobody has bothered to count properly, is how many crew members have already left and are not coming back.

The federal government’s wage subsidy was designed for businesses with employees. The screen industry runs on freelancers. Sole traders. ABN holders who invoice production companies for six-week blocks, then invoice a different production company for the next six weeks, then have three weeks of nothing, then start again. JobKeeper covered some of them, the ones attached to a production company long enough to qualify, but it missed a significant portion of the workforce that actually makes Australian film and television happen.

The attrition numbers

Screen Producers Australia surveyed its membership in November 2020. The headline figure: 32 per cent of crew who responded said they had taken work outside the screen industry during the pandemic. Of those, 14 per cent said they did not intend to return. The sample size was small, roughly 400 respondents, and self-selecting. But the directionality is clear. People left. Some of them have found steadier work elsewhere and have no reason to come back to an industry that was already unstable before a pandemic shut it down for five months.

The departments hit hardest are the ones you would expect. Construction, transport, locations, and catering lost crew to the building industry, logistics, and hospitality respectively. These are departments where the skills transfer directly and the pay is comparable. A set carpenter earning $1,400 a week on a production that runs for eight weeks can earn the same on a residential build that runs for eight months. The choice is not complicated.

International productions restart first

The pattern emerging in early 2021 is bifurcated. International productions, the Marvel shoots, the Netflix originals, the projects with studio-level budgets, are restarting. They can absorb the $500,000 to $800,000 COVID compliance surcharge because it represents a single-digit percentage of their total spend. Local productions cannot. A $4 million Australian drama adding $600,000 in COVID costs has to find that money from somewhere, and the somewhere is usually post-production, development, or the contingency fund.

The result is a two-speed recovery. Fox Studios in Moore Park is busy. Docklands Studios in Melbourne has international bookings. Meanwhile, independent Australian productions are delayed, downsized, or stuck in financing rounds that were already difficult before lenders started asking about pandemic insurance.

Screen Australia’s production data for the July-December 2020 period shows 23 drama productions in some stage of production nationally. Of those, nine were international footprint productions. The remaining 14 were local, and several of those had been greenlit before COVID and were completing delayed shoots rather than starting new ones. New local greenlights in the back half of 2020 were, by multiple accounts, “extremely thin on the ground.”

The freelancer problem

The structural issue predates COVID. Australian screen has always relied on a freelance workforce with no sick leave, no redundancy, and no continuity of employment. The industry treated this as flexibility. It was flexibility, for the employers. For the crew, it was precariousness dressed up as independence.

COVID exposed the precariousness. Crew who had been in the industry for fifteen or twenty years discovered that their professional network, the thing that kept them employed, was worth nothing when every production shut down simultaneously. The phone stopped ringing for everyone at the same time. There was no seniority, no tenure, no institutional memory that protected experienced crew over newcomers. Everyone was equally unemployed.

JobKeeper papered over some of this. It gave people income while productions were paused. But it did not address the underlying problem, which is that the screen industry’s labour model depends on a surplus of available crew willing to tolerate gaps between jobs. If enough of those people leave, the surplus disappears, and productions start competing for the same small pool of available crew. This drives up rates in the short term, which sounds good for workers but is destabilising for an industry that budgets crew costs 18 months before a shoot begins.

What the data does not show

The numbers that do not exist are the ones that matter most. How many below-the-line crew were working in Australian screen in January 2020? Nobody knows precisely. Screen Australia does not maintain a workforce census. The unions have membership figures but not all crew are union members, particularly in non-union departments like locations and transport. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance estimates its screen division membership at around 4,500, but actual below-the-line headcount is likely double that.

Without a baseline, you cannot measure attrition with confidence. You can survey, which SPA did. You can talk to heads of department, who will tell you that their contact lists are shorter than they were. You can look at the productions that are crewing up and notice that roles that used to attract fifteen applicants are now attracting five. But you cannot put a definitive number on how many people the industry lost, which means you cannot plan for replacing them, which means the conversation about workforce development stays vague when it needs to be specific.

The subsidy ends in March. After that, the people who stayed will find out whether there is enough work to justify having stayed.