The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero is seeking to curb excessive working hours in the entertainment industry that expose its workers to unhealthy and unsafe conditions.
Escudero, who is married to actress-painter Heart Evangelista, said he plans to file a bill reducing to 12 hours the workday schedule of workers in film, television, radio, theater and other forms of media to protect their well-being.
“Workers in film, TV, and other forms of media spend an unreasonable number of hours at work, which is not only inhumane, but also detrimental to their health,” Escudero said in a statement last Tuesday.
According to the lawmaker, the bill also aims to fill a gap in the Labor Code of the Philippines that failed to provide “normal hours of work to a unique set of workers, whose hours of work per day have yet to be set as a matter of statutory policy.”
The grueling production schedules and long working hours in the movie and TV industries came under scrutiny after famous movie and TV directors Wenn V. Deramas and Francis Xavier Pasion died of cardiac arrest within two weeks of each other.
The 49-year-old Deramas was one of the ABS-CBN network’s go-to directors, helming such box-office hits as Ang Tanging Ina (The Only Mother) and Beauty and the Bestie, as well as popular primetime soaps Mula sa Puso (From the Heart) and Sa Dulo ng Walang Hanggan (At the Edge of Eternity).
The 38-year-old Pasion, a colleague of Deramas at ABS-CBN, is best known for his award-winning independent films Jay, Sampaguita and Bwaya (Crocodile), which were first screened at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival. He also directed several TV programs, including Nathaniel and On the Wings of Love.
Notable directors and actors have publicly complained about the punishing shooting schedules in order to meet deadlines and cut down production costs. Some TV crew members, they said, even work for 72 consecutive hours without sleep just to finish an episode.
“The successive deaths of these directors should serve as a wake-up call. We should push for a more reasonable schedule for industry workers who normally work 16 to 18 hours a day,” Escudero said. PNA WITH ALVIN I. DACANAY