Work

Blacklisted film set workers awarded tens of thousands of euro against top production firm

WRC finds Morgan O’Sullivan and late James Flynn’s Metropolitan Films International breached workers rights and dismissed them unfairly

The Workplace Relations Commission has found the production company behind a string of international hits, led by Morgan O'Sullivan and the late James Flynn, blacklisted workers for raising concerns over contracts

Stephen Bourke
Mon Jan 1 2024 - 05:00

A group of film set workers who were blacklisted for raising contract concerns have secured tens of thousands of euro each against a company behind a string of television hits including Love Hate, the Vikings and the Tudors.

The workers had claimed in their action that two of Ireland’s leading movie producers – Morgan O’Sullivan and the late James Flynn – were “morally bankrupt” as they accused them of committing systematic employment law breaches.

The Workplace Relations Commission has made public an initial tranche of decisions awarding €434,216 against Metropolitan Films International Ltd to some members the Irish Film Workers’ Association (IFWA) who complained en masse two years ago. The figure may yet rise as the tribunal processes and releases its decisions on further statutory complaints by those workers and their fellow union members, which are expected to come in the days ahead.

Nearly 40 members of the breakaway trade union accused the producers and their associated entities of breaching the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 by failing to honour their statutory right to a permanent contract after four years’ service and of penalising them for challenging the situation.

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The union had said its campaigning against “systematic blacklisting” in the Irish film industry led to the men losing jobs they had held for decades in companies controlled by Mr O’Sullivan and Mr Flynn. The workers had registered complaints against two entities, World 2000 Entertainment Ltd and Metropolitan Film Productions Ltd, stating that they were employed by the companies, of which the two producers were the “principal directors”.

The respondent companies were the parents of a series of designated activity companies (DACs) and special-purpose vehicles set up for tax relief on film and TV productions in Ireland in recent years, the Workplace Relations Commission was told.

Representatives of the Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation (IBEC), who appeared for the producers at hearings in 2022 and 2023, denied the workers were ever direct employees of the firms but had instead been hired from film to film by the designated activity companies.

[ Film industry workers accuse producers of systematic employment law breaches ]

The WRC has rejected that argument, and made the orders for compensation against Metropolitan Films International Ltd, a group entity it found was the ultimate employer. Not only had many of the workers been entitled to assert their entitlement to a contract of indefinite duration, a number of them were penalised with dismissal for doing so, adjudication officer Catherine Byrne concluded.

In 13 cases decided so far, Ms Byrne ordered Metropolitan to pay each of the workers €5,000 in compensation for the failure to provide a written statement setting out the reasons for employing them on a specified purpose contract in breach of the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act, 2003. Ten of those workers have also received €25,000 for penalisation by way of dismissal for attempting to assert their entitlement to a fixed-term contract.

The tribunal has also made orders of four weeks’ wages per worker for breaches of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act for the failure to provide the complainants with compliant contractual statements, with the awards ranging from €5,000 to €9,000 made to 18 workers so far.

One of those awarded €30,000 for breaches of the Protection of Employees Act, plasterer William Hanlon, told the WRC he was “blackballed for a couple of months on the strength of questioning the behaviour of a supervisor”. “If you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, act in a particular way ... you would be gently put aside,” he said.

Mr Hanlon said IFWA became “a dirty name” in the workplace after an appearance before the Oireachtas by IFWA shop steward John Arkins’ in 2018.

In submissions on one of the claims, one Ibec industrial relations executive said the DACs were “in no way a circumvention of employment rights” – calling the film business “a freelance industry, not just for cast and crew, but for producers too”.

The decisions amount to a reversal by the WRC after it rejected jurisdiction in six initial test cases in 2022, when it decided the complainants were too late to bring claims. Ms Byrne had previously ruled the IFWA members should have known they were not being brought back to work early in 2019, soon enough to bring complaints within the required six-month statutory window.

Ms Byrne heard the balance of the claims one by one over the course of several months in 2023 and wrote that her view had changed on foot of new evidence which emerged in the later hearings.

She said she had assumed in an earlier case taken by the shop steward, Mr Arkins, that he should have known sooner than December 2019 that there was no work for him, when in fact Metropolitan had no film productions running until November 2019 and that it only became apparent to the IFWA members that they were not being called back for work when shooting began for Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel that month.

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