Most of these are California cites. What about other states, like Florida, for example. Can an employer take money out of your pay for broken equipment?
Apparently, yes: http://www.laborlawtalk.com/showthread.php?t=89962
So… this started because I lost a walkie. I made it clear I wasn’t paying for it. Issue was mute for about a month, then production found the walkie somewhere, so it became a non-issue.
HOWEVER… now, they make employees sign a form when they checkout a walkie saying that if they lose it, they’ll be liable for the $700. (Actually they upped it to $800.)
As the show’s director, I can tell them to go fuck themselves and not sign it. If they think I can do my job effectively without being able to talk to the crew – I can’t, by the way – then they don’t have to give me a walkie, but I won’t sign for it either way.
However, some of the lower end guys don’t have the luxury of saying no. Production assistants are easily replaceable, for instance.
So assuming they sign – this is all hypothetical, problem hasn’t come up yet – and they lose the walkie, would they then be liable for the $800 in California? From what I understand you can’t sign away your legal rights as a general rule, but what about in this hypothetical situation?
Isn’t this sort of thing covered by your professional indemnity insurance?
It’s. . . . complicated. We’ve covered this before, but let me just point out that I’m not licensed to practice law in California.
Next it’s important to make a distinction that we’ve been straddling so far. Different rules can and often do apply to deductions from pay and employees’ liabilities to employers. Regarding the former, the rule is ambiguous:
Does this cover deductions for losses? It might. I don’t know. I think there is room for argument either way, but I haven’t read the cases. You could call the department of labor.
Regarding the latter, the law is even murkier. All we have are the broadbrush principles that we discussed earlier in the thread. IIRC, I tried unsuccessfully to find the cases that say employee-caused losses are a risk of doing business. I also quoted another part of the DOL’s site that says an employer probably can sue an employee for losses. Therefore, I’m going with an uneducated and tentative yes on this one.
Disabuse yourself of this idea. It’s not right. In the case of payroll deductions, we see an exception that proves the rule. Wage and hour rules talk specifically about what can be deducted with written permission. To the extent something isn’t specifically covered by the statute, it’s likely a court would find it’s not included in the statutory provision, and that the statutory provision gives all of the exceptions. Otherwise, the general rule is that you can sign away your legal rights. That’s what contracts and written waivers are all about.
You are exactly wrong. I have been a freelance camera operator for 28 years. I have logged literally hundreds of thousands of hours at work on thousands and thousands of jobs. I have seen everything from dropped H.M.I. bulbs ( $ 1,000 - 4,000 replacement cost) to damaged props, damaged art work. I watched a grip shove a c-stand arm through a painting at the Met once on a Martha Stewart shoot. This was pretty grim, as it was a rather valuable work of art.
I’ve seen locations damaged, vehicles damaged and destroyed. Cameras, lenses and filters wrecked.
Not once have I heard of a FREELANCE UN-SALARIED crew member who was personally charged for damaged or lost or stolen gear. Not once.
Please provide cite showing that this is common practice. Hell, provide cite showing that it happened in either L.A. or New York five times in 2007.
It is simply not at all the truth. This is not 1939 and we do not all work as salary employees for Louis B. Mayer. It is and as for roughly 45 years been a freelance non-contract employee industry.
Production Insurance exists for very good reasons. Mind you, I am only addressing damage or destruction of non-living property. Injury or death to people is not at all what I am addressing here.
Cartooniverse
filmyak, have you read your contract? That’s the very first thing to look at. If the document is silent as to your responsibility for losses due to negligence you’re pretty much in the clear. If otherwise, you have an uphill battle. But, there are arguments for voiding a contractual term such as adhesion and unconscionability (google should help you with those).
Beyond that you could also argue that lost or damaged equipment is unavoidable due to the nature of your work. If you are constantly moving and active a lost piece of small equipment surely is bound to happen regardless of reasonable care, and your failure to lose anything previously was merely a matter of luck and/or elevated diligence.
What contract?
Seriously, there’s no contract. Every now and then on a job there’s a deal memo, but those can be rare. Usually you agree on a rate and your job and that’s it.
And for PA’s, there’s almost never a contract. I really am not worried about myself, just curious what would happen to a guy making $600/week being asked to sign for an $800 walkie talkie that, as cartoon pointed out, every real production would cover if an employee lost it.
Gfactor had good legal info, and I’m sure he’s close to the truth. But the film/tv industry is a moderately unique animal with a fairly long history, and the show I’m on now is breaking tradition (the guy running it is beyond greedy, to an extreme that would be comical if it didn’t affect the folks working on the show so much).
As I said I’m not in the film business, this was simply how an independent contractor in a real estate office might see the matter from an ethical perspective. It sounds like equipment in your industry is far more subject to rough handling & damage, so the rules are necessarily different.
In Hawaii, case law says you can not be billed for such. However, they can simply fire you.