Engagement document updates

Earlier this year, Council completed new policy on the review process for scale agreements and engagement policies. These are the core documents under which members are contracted. They take two forms:

• negotiated, where the terms and conditions of engagement are the result of mutual agreement with an engager or association of engagers; and
• promulgated, where Equity itself sets the terms, based on the negotiated terms of like-type agreements.

The new policy enforces two key requirements: members must be aware of and have the opportunity to contribute the review process for each cycle, and members must be informed of the results of that work. Policy details can be found in section EL-11 of our policy document.

Since agreements are reviewed/revised in different ways, these two requirements will necessarily have different implementation across the full range of engagement documents. In the case of the Ballet Agreement, for instance, the review cycle is quite apparent to all members engaged under that agreement. It's relatively easy to get the affected membership together in one place to discuss issues and possible changes, and to share information with them through the conclusion of negotiations and ratification

For many of the other agreements, particularly the promulgated ones, this process is much harder to replicate, since the affected membership is in constant flux and spread across the whole country.

Council's goal in establishing policy in this area was to provide a common-denominator standard to all reviews. Established processes that already exceed these expectations will continue to operate as before.

If you want to know what's coming up for review, and when, and how you can contribute, you can now find that information in one place, available to all members. Beginning with the Summer 2011 issue of EQ magazine, members will find a regularly-posted information block detailing upcoming contract reviews, a basic schedule for each, and information on how to contribute to the review or negotiation. All engagement documents are already dated to indicate the review cycle as a whole – review information will only be posted in EQ as the review dates approach.

We hope that members will make active use of this information, so that our engagement documents continue to reflect the expectations of our membership in this ever-changing business.

Independent Theatre Review Committee report

At the most recent Council meeting, the ITRC presented an initial report on the results from its member survey work, and you can find the summary document here. This report only covers the results from closed-ended questions (i.e. where a selection of possible answers were provided), and over 7000 open-ended text replies are still under review. As one may guess, collating and summarising these into a reliable data set is an enormous undertaking.

The ITRC also has a requirement to survey engagers and Equity staff on related matters, so that Council can have a complete picture from which to consider policy changes. This work is still ongoing.