Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1014407
68 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2018 LABOR MAT TERS DGA: MINORITY DIRECTORS DECLINE, WOMEN GAIN The Directors Guild examined 651 live-action films released theatrically in the United States — documentaries, animated films and re-releases were not included — and found that 12 percent of their directors were women, writes Cara Buckley in The New York Times. The DGA modified its pool of data to see how many minorities were directors, since films that were not signatories did not report reliably. The DGA survey got its data on minorities from the 145 films that made $250,000 or more and were union signatories. That 10 percent of those directors were people of color represented a drop from 17 percent in 2013. Saying that discrimination is "still rampant" in the film industry, the DGA released its second report on Feature Film Diversity on June 21, which found that 9.7 percent of live- action American films with box office takes of at least $250,000 were directed by minorities last year. This figure is a five-year low and a significant drop over the last five years. Female directors did better than ever before in the same span of time, adds David Robb on Deadline Hollywood. The number of female directors doubled compared to their level in 2013. According to the report, 22 women directed 12.2 percent of all feature films last year that grossed more than $250,000. But as a percentage of the nation's population, they're still more under-represented than minority directors. Visit www.dga.org to read the report. "It's outrageous that we're once again seeing such a lack of opportunity for women and people of color to direct feature films," DGA president Thomas Schlamme said. "Our new study shows that discriminatory practices are still rampant across every corner of the feature film business. These numbers hit home how the chips are stacked against women and people of color. We dug into our proprietary data to see if we could isolate areas that were bright spots or especially problematic. But as we kept going, it became clear that no matter how you slice the 2017 numbers, the outcome is virtually the same." WHITE HOUSE PROPOSES RELAXING CHILD LABOR LAWS President Donald Trump's Department of Labor has officially sent the White House a proposal to allow teenagers to "spend full days operating chainsaws and meat slicers and working in other dangerous occupations," writes Jake Johnson in Common Dreams. The Trump White House has conducted a "broad and relentless effort to roll back longstanding workplace safety regulations that have drastically reduced on- the-job injuries and deaths over the last several decades," adds Johnson. The proposal to loosen child labor restrictions has been denounced by workers rights advocates, lawmakers, and former DOL officials, and is "one procedural hurdle from public release," reports Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law. WORKER TESTIFIES TESLA STOPPED UNION ORGANIZING A Tesla employee organizing a union was asked by a supervisor and company security guards to leave the factory after handing out pro- union flyers, the worker said at a National Labor Relations Board hearing in early June, according to Reuters. The NLRB was interested in whether Tesla had violated federal safeguards for employee activity. The NLRB general counsel brought the case before an administrative law judge after receiving complaints from three Tesla workers and the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW). "What we see is a very heavy-handed, anti- Child labor has a long and painful history. In this historical photo by Lewis Hine, dated December 3, 1908, a little girl is working in the Mollohan Textile Mill in Newberry, South Carolina. The "overseer" told the photographer that "she just happened in." The mills appear to be full of youngsters that "just happened in" or "are helping sister." Courtesy of National Child Labor Committee collection at the Library of Congress