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"Blame Canada," writes Glenn Collins in the New York Times. "That's the rallying cry these days among New York City's film workers as they listen anxiously for the giant sucking sound of movie jobs departing for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver." Filmmaking in New
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Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal star in Analyze That, the sequel to Analyze This. Because of the commitment of the film's producers, the picture was shot in New York. But feature film expenditures in the city decreased 19% from 1999 to 2000 as production went abroad, primarily to Canada. |
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Nevertheless, some New Yorkers are doggedly resisting the call from the north. "There is no better backdrop than New York, and the look of our film is crucial to its authenticity," said Jane Rosenthal, a producer of Analyze That, the sequel to Analyze This. It began shooting in the metropolitan area April 3. "We were asked about shooting Analyze That in Canada," Rosenthal said, "it was right after September 11, and in view of our commitment to the city, we felt it had to be here."
Ana Campoy, writing in the Wall Street Journal, points to similar, difficult decisions being made by producers of television commercials, who scour the world for advantageous exchange rates and cheaper production costs. In South Africa, where the Rand stands at 10 to 1 with the dollar, producers say they can hire a production crew for less than 40 percent of what they pay in Los Angeles. Equipment savings can amount to as much as 40 percent, as well. Even in Canada, where the exchange rate is 1.5 to 1, producers are able to save around 30 percent on production costs.
In response to this hemorrhaging of film work, the California Assembly passed legislation to give smaller productions a 15 percent credit against the state wage tax. At press time, the California Senate was amending the bill. A similar federal subsidy bill, SB 1278, awaits further action. On another front, the Film and Television Action Committee released a detailed legal memo outlining its own trade remedy campaign, which intends to eliminate Canadian subsidies entirely. The memo, prepared by Stewart & Stewart, a leading Washington, D.C. law firm that specializes in international trade issues, offered a promising analysis. Canadian film subsidies, which attract the majority of U.S. runaway production, "are actionable both under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (one of the sub-agreements that establishes the rights and obligations of World Trade Organization members) and under the domestic U.S. countervailing duty law."
NY Times 6/24/02 | Wall Street Journal 6/24/02 | FTAC Press Release 6/2/02
The United Nations' 175-country International Labor Organization observed its first "World Day Against Child Labor" on June 12. "We are asking everyone to join together in working towards a world where no children will be deprived of a normal, healthy childhood, where parents can find decent jobs and children can go to school. Our goal is a world free from child labor," said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. According to its report, "A Future Without Child Labor," a whopping 246 million children, one in every six aged 5 to 17, are involved in child labor. Some 179 million children aged 5-17 -- one in every eight children in the world -- are exposed to work that endangers their physical, mental or moral well-being.
U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, in Geneva to address the annual meeting of the ILO, said the Bush administration is staying away from previous U.S. efforts to make "core labor standards" part of trade agreements with developing countries. Chao said she would press the United Nations' labor agency to lead the fight for basic work standards and keep the issue out of the hands of U.S. trade negotiators. "There's a great deal of disagreement as to whether trade should be linked to a whole host of other, non-trade issues -- core labor standards being one, the environment being another, human rights being still another," Chao told the Associated Press in an interview.
The Labor Department's policy shift effectively reverses a commitment made by President George Bush in April of 2001 at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. In their final declaration, President Bush and 33 other heads of state pledged to "promote compliance with internationally recognized core labor standards as embodied in the ILO's Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work." The ILO declaration established four core standards: freedom of association and collective bargaining, freedom from workplace discrimination, freedom from forced labor, and freedom from child labor.
Labor organizations all over the world have formed highly critical and hostile views of globalization in general and the World Trade Organization in particular, arguing that its rules "encourage exploitation of labor, the degradation of our environment, and do nothing to limit the growing power of multinational corporations and capital. The WTO has undermined the legitimate national regulations protecting the environment, human rights, and public health," according to an AFL-CIO Executive Council Statement, issued on August 4, 1999.
ILO Conference Summary 6/16/02 | Summit of the Americas, Final Declarations 4/21/01
A Senate panel approved legislation requiring the Labor Department to create regulations governing the nation's employers in efforts to reduce repetitive-stress injuries. The bill directs
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AFL-CIO President John Sweeney confers with Senator Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The panel approved legislation that would direct the Labor Department to create new ergonomics regulations, rather than Labor Secretary Chao's preferred voluntary guidelines. The bill is expected to reach the Senate floor in the fall. Photo by Jay Mallin |
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"The administration's plan to address this health crisis in the workplace replays failed strategies from the past," said Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). "They rely on toothless voluntary guidelines that most corporations will simply ignore. These guidelines [would] be developed piecemeal, industry by industry, rather than covering workers at risk in all industries." The Clinton administration's ergonomic rules, negated by Congress last year, would have required businesses to change workstations to reduce injuries and in some cases compensate injured workers. The Labor Department estimated the changes would have cost businesses $4.5 billion, but would save them $9 billion by preventing injuries. Businesses estimated the cost at $100 billion.
Senator Kennedy's committee has also featured testimony on the harassment, firings and lack of recourse experienced by working men and women attempting to legally form unions. But the vast majority of news outlets have ignored it. In the '50s and '60s, every major paper had a reporter on the labor beat. These days there are at most a dozen labor reporters nationwide, and many only cover labor part-time. One cause is the steady increase in media mergers that we've seen in the last decade, where formerly disparate voices in print, radio and television have been combined under a single corporate umbrella. As big media gets bigger the diversity of news content is eroded. And the large corporations that create the vast majority of news here see little value in giving airtime to their adversaries in organized labor. But what Americans see and hear in their news reports influences their opinions, perhaps more effectively than any advertising campaign could. By keeping labor news off the air, management promotes the idea that unions are irrelevant, without saying a word.
The Department of Labor has begun posting internal financial documents from hundreds of labor unions on its web site. Department spokeswoman Sue Hensley wrote in the Washington Post that the initiative to post labor-management records, also known as LMs, reflects the department's efforts to promote greater transparency and make more information available to the public.
But labor sees it differently. "It's very discriminatory," said Jon Hiatt, general counsel of the AFL-CIO. "They are putting union LMs online, but not employer or management consultant LMs online at the same time." The LM records have been required of both unions and management since 1959 by the Landrum-Griffin Act. Union activists argue that employers spend huge amounts each year in quasi-legal campaigns of intimidation to block workers' organizing efforts, but those financial statements must still be painstakingly requested from the Labor Department.
DOL Press Release 6/13/02 | Washington Post 6/13/02
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