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Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho poses for a photo after winning the Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival on May 25. (EPA/Yonhap News)

Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho was already in the spotlight for winning the Palme d’Or at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival for his film “Parasite,” and now he’s getting more attention for saying that he complied with the “standard labor contract” in the filming of “Parasite.”

During an interview with Cine 21 last month about “Parasite,” Bong said that one thing that has changed from when he shot his film “Mother” 10 years ago is the introduction of the standard labor contract.

Bong said he really liked the filming schedule imposed by the standard labor contract. “My body has gotten weaker with age, and I’m not sure what I would’ve done without the standard labor contract,” Bong said.

Responding to concerns that production costs will rise if his staff are guaranteed a minimum wage and a 52-hour workweek, Bong said that such a rise is a positive thing. “I always felt guilty about my artistic judgment forcing people to work longer and making their jobs more difficult. It finally feels like things are being ‘normalized,’” he said.

The standard labor contract was first applied to film crews with “Ode to My Father,” in 2014, and now there are expectations in the film industry that Bong’s remarks will help the contract spread even further.

According to a survey about working conditions for film crew staff that was carried out by the Korean Film Council (KFC) in 2016, their average yearly income was 19.7 million won (US$16,603), or just 1.64 million won (US$1,382) a month. They worked an average of 5.45 days a week, for an average of 12.8 hours a day. A whopping 69.4% of crew members surveyed said they’d never used any of their holidays.

This was based on a common industry practice of hiring crew members as subcontractors rather than on standard employment contracts. Subcontractors aren’t recognized as workers under the Labor Standards Act.

The standard labor contract for the film industry was designed to resolve those problems by requiring enrollment in the four social insurance programs, overtime pay, and specification of the contract period. Awareness spread about the need for such measures after the Federation of Korea Movie Workers’ Union (FKMWU), established in 2005, held a campaign urging studios to use these contracts.

The contract was created and released in May 2011 by the Film Industry Cooperation Committee, a committee representing the government (the KFC), workers (the FKMWU), and management (the Korean Film Producers Association), but it was slow to be adopted because of resistance from cost-conscious film studios.

But after the Promotion of the Motion Pictures and Video Products Act was revised in April 2015 to require the use of employment contracts and the specification of work conditions (Article 3, Clause 4) and to make studios that delay payment of wages or fail to use the standard labor contract ineligible to receive support from the Film Development Fund (Article 3, Clause 8), the number of films using the standard labor contract jumped from 36.3% at the time of the 2015 survey to 77.8% in 2018.

One shortcoming of the survey is that it doesn’t include low-budget films in which the total cost of production is below 400 million won (US$337,126, which adjusted to US$843,085 in 2018), adult films for IPTV (Internet Protocol television), documentaries, or animated films. The KFC’s 2018 fact-finding study about the application of the standard labor contract only covered 63 of 652 films released last year, and crew members only had standard labor contracts in 49 of those 63 films. Those tended to be films involving distributors with chaebol funding.

“Since we’ve started using employment contracts, there’s been a huge decline in the number of crew members whose wages are delayed. And since studios have to obey the law, it’s easier for crew members to speak up, which has caused working hours to start decreasing as well. My expectation is that Bong Joon-ho’s remarks will have the positive effect of expanding the application of the standard labor contract in the film industry,” said Lee Sang-gil, senior vice chairman of the FKMWU.

By Seon Dam-eun, staff reporter

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