ENTECH ON THE ROAD: Stale Crew

By Julius Grafton.

Last week we detailed a couple of venue issues in two articles, ‘What is a sandwich?’ and this tale of the World’s Slowest Floor Manager. At ENTECH in Melbourne and Adelaide this week, more than a few people asked me whether any of the the venues in the stories would have us back. My answer: who knows? We were banned by Randwick Racecourse after they double booked us, so I guess some venue managers have thin skin.

The intention wasn’t to name and shame venues, rather to highlight the fine line between a smooth event and one that has a painful birth. This fine line is in the venue planning, and I was attempting to illustrate how important it is for venues to carefully read the brief and to ask questions when in doubt. Our event is significantly different to any other event due to the way we set it up. We don’t have a set-up day, our schedule doesn’t allow it, and we don’t need it.

Our only real snag this week started at 6am on Tuesday in the Melbourne Convention Centre Dock, where our four trucks and touring crew met the loaders. They staggered in, direct from a long load out elsewhere. Like most live shows, we hire stagehands from an agency, paying between $45 and $57 an hour (depending on timings) for each.

According to my interpretation of the Live Performance Award, these crew needed at least a ten hour break before our call, unless they were starting late in the night and counting working for me until 11am. In any case, they were hardly fit for purpose. They were very tired.

This presents a problem. Under the most benign interpretation of the Workplace Health and Safety laws in Victoria and indeed nationally, EVERYONE has a duty of care to ensure (which I take to mean ‘guarantee’) a safe workplace. At 6am on show day with four trucks to unload I have been placed in a very difficult position. Do I send them home?

If I send them home, my event would not open at 11am as scheduled. It is possible that many or all of my exhibitor clients would then make a claim against me and it is not foreseeable whether my insurer would meet these claims, since I caused the event to open late. I’d suffer reputational and financial damage, because a crewing agency did the wrong thing.

See how it plays out? So what did we do? We implemented a never before used contingency plan and employed extreme vigilance. We slowed the pace down. We gave the crew coffee. We ran behind in our schedule, but had an allowance for that.

Had one of those crew suffered an accident, the investigation would have revealed the situation, and I would have been personally liable for some of the blame and potentially facing criminal charges. Had one of the crew died as a consequence, I could have been facing an industrial manslaughter charge, and some long time in the big house. The one where you need soap-on-a-rope in the showers.

I called the agency to find out what happened. “We had all our crew on yesterday”, the guy said. “It was a public holiday. What could I do?”

“Well, you could sub the job out”, I told him, like we’ve had elsewhere when an agency looks at their resources and makes a reasonable assessment that sending tired crew from a late load out to an early load out is both unprofessional and illegal?

He seems tired himself. I request fresh crew, and some extras, for the load out. I hire a forklift to make it easier. The night crew feature some of the morning crew, but they’ve had a sleep and they perform OK.

The invoice arrives. I’m not paying full rate for that load-in, because I’m not rewarding a crewing agency for flogging their crew. I’ll certainly pay what the crew are due, but I’m not paying a profit margin for this kind of stupidity.

Elsewhere we get mostly good crew, but never as good as in New Zealand. Those crew are insanely motivated and love to get on with things!

Then there was the time when NO crew turned up because they (wrongly) had the event running the NEXT day. And the day when they turned up a day EARLY and called me in confusion from the locked and dark dock. But those things are in the past, and we don’t dwell on past matters for long.