Feudal societies and Hobbit law: The story of ‘The Hobbit amendment’

Abstract

The film industry has traditionally relied on freelancers and self-employed artists in many of the roles needed in production and post-production. The industry relies on project-based labour whereby teams of creative artists are assembled and interact for the duration of a venture and are then disbanded at the end of the production (Rowlands & Handy, 2012). Freelance working is now a core feature of film production, television and associated industries (Heery, 2004). It has been suggested that the flexibilities associated with self-employment are a natural component for these industries and that this model could be applied to other knowledge-based industries (de Bruin & Hanrahan, 2003). Other studies have found that individuals in the creative industries do not necessarily identify with the popular depiction of themselves as individualistic entrepreneurs and therefore pre-disposed to pursue self-employment (Coulson, 2012). The film and television industry has been subject to de-regulation in some countries, with the result that the proportion of the workforce made up of freelance workers has significantly increased. This has been the direct result of government action in some cases (Saundary, 2001).

The consequences of classification of workers as being self-employed entail exclusion from many traditional employment protection rights. Self-employed workers or independent contractors are almost always excluded from access to lawful collective bargaining in common law countries (McCrystal, 2014). The purpose of this study is to highlight some of the problems associated with the status of creative workers as independent contractors, by detailing a particular instance of the re-regulation of that status for film workers in NZ by means of parliamentary process.