Initiative from German members VdRSD and VSK:
Job sharing in the Film industry
Working as a filmmaker has never been a job that correlated very well with a steady social life or founding a family. Long working hours while on projects, being temporarily absent for months, a more or less irregular income – none of that invites a healthy work-life balance.
Still, filmmakers love their jobs and try to make it work. One thing to do is – of course – join a professional association to further the fight for better working conditions and fair pay. Another thing is being creative in the existing conditions. That’s what 2 members of the German associations VdRSD and VSK did.
Together, Veronika Große (VSK) and Florian Singer (VdRSD) are leading the working group ‘Jobsharing’. They organized a Signal group with lots of members of different branches of the Art Department and tried to establish the concept of job sharing across professions, fields, and projects. They found big interest in the membership of the associations as well as non-members but also included the main federal and local employment offices for filmmakers (ZAV – Zentrale Künstlervermittlung – Central Agency for Artists) in their efforts to promote the concept.
Since it takes time and lots of people to successfully and thoroughly implement the concept in the industry, its progress is stagnating from time to time. Florian and Veronika summarized their work into a file, we translated the German version into English, so you can read all about it. Find more info (in German) about job sharing on the homepages of VdRSD and VSK.