Nova Scotia Losing Egg
In a frankly-worded email sent to clients, colleagues and friends and later posted to their Facebook page, Halifax’s Egg Studios has announced that they will close in early November as a result of a labour arbitration that has seen them in a bitter legal fight with the film technicians’ union, IATSE Local 849.
“What started as a dream more than 10 years ago has become the worst nightmare of our lives,” said Mike Hachey who owns the company along with Sara Thomas.
“The fact we have been bullied and held hostage by crotchety labour academics, belligerent labour activists, pompous union lawyers, and politicians who care more about protecting their own jobs instead of fixing an outdated and unfair Trade Union Act, is enough for us.”
The company says the trouble started in 2011 when Nova Scotia’s provincial NDP government passed a law allowing the Nova Scotia Labour Board to impose a contract on workplaces that had recently been unionized in cases where a collective bargaining agreement couldn’t be reached.
Despite their 20 full-time employees being non-unionized workers, Egg’s commercial shoots have regularly contracted unionized workers.
Because of this, the film technicians’ union applied to the Labour Board on behalf of its workers whom Egg was contracting to have Egg Studios certified, meaning they would have to pay into Workers’ Compensation Insurance, CPP, and EI. Their argument was that because Egg employed unionized workers, the workers’ employment with Egg also came under the jurisdiction of the union’s collective bargaining.
For its part, Egg argued in front of the Labour Board and later the courts that it was bringing in the workers as independent contractors.
Saying that they are the first production company in Canada to be certified, Egg argued that the union was doing this as a first step towards certifying the larger commercial industry across Canada. In a response on the company’s website to an outline of IATSE Local 849’s grievances posted online and titled Egg Films Don’t Be Rotten, Egg stated that the standard practice among production companies was to create Voluntary Recognition Agreements (VRAs) with contracted union members that last for the duration of a shoot. Their certification by the Nova Scotia Labour Board would have compelled them to conform to a single agreement that would apply to all of their productions.
In September of 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada refused Egg’s application to appeal the ruling.
In accordance with the 2011 law, the Nova Scotia Labour Board imposed a one-year contract on Egg and the union, which expired in the fall of 2014. In March of this year, Egg locked out 290 unionized film technicians, stating that the union was not attempting to continue negotiations in good faith.
Egg also charges that IATSE Local 849 failed to consult with their union members working regularly for Egg before pursuing certification, and ignored the input of members who Egg says told them that the limited work they received through Egg would not have an impact on their insurance and retirement funds.
“We will always love Nova Scotia for its beauty and charm, but the fact is this province is not open for business.”
Egg has pledged to fulfill its current production commitments, but says that this is the end of its time in Halifax.
“There will be no spin-off business and certainly no concerted effort to bypass the Labour Board ruling. We are done and saying farewell to Nova Scotia.”
A reel of Egg’s work can be viewed here.