By Denise Hattingh, Managing Director, KEU Underwriting Managers
The South African film and events industries have always had their own rhythm. The Employment Laws Amendment Bill introduces a new layer of film and events risk that this industry can no longer afford to treat as peripheral. The crew gets called. Shoots get scheduled. Events get built over three days and broken down in one night. For as long as I have worked in this space, the financial and legal frameworks governing those relationships have lagged significantly behind the operational reality on the ground. Payments happen on terms shaped by habit. Contracts reflect what has always been done rather than what the law actually requires. And the people doing the work, the crew, the casuals, the freelancers, have largely absorbed the risk of that informality themselves.
That is changing.
The Employment Laws Amendment Bill and the Labour Relations Amendment Bill, published in Government Gazette No. 54220 on 26 February 2026, represent the most substantive legislative shift this sector has faced in years. The public comment period closed on 28 March. The industry has had its opportunity to engage with the process. Now the bills move forward, and the conversation shifts from input to preparation.
I want to be clear about what this piece is and is not. It is not a legal opinion. I am not an attorney, and I am not offering compliance advice. What I am offering is an underwriting perspective, a view shaped by years of thinking about how risk presents itself in film and event environments, and how these legislative changes alter that picture in ways the industry needs to start taking seriously. Not eventually. Now.
What “On Call” Actually Costs Now
Anyone familiar with how film sets and live events operate knows what “on-call” really means in practice. It means a crew member who has turned down three other jobs that week because they were told to keep themselves available. It means people arriving at a venue at six in the morning, waiting four hours, and being sent home because the client pulled out the night before. It means a system where the financial consequence of that cancellation has historically fallen on the worker, not the production.
Section 9B of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act draws a line through that arrangement.
If enacted in their current form, the new provisions would require employers, which include production companies and event organisers, to provide workers with defined availability windows, maximum hours for each period, reasonable notice to report, and reasonable notice when work is cancelled. In practice, this would mean that a shoot day cancelled without adequate notice would require the production to pay the crew for those hours. Full stop.
I have been saying for some time that cancellation risk in this industry is underestimated. What this proposed legislation seeks to do is make that risk explicit and enforceable. A cancelled shoot day is no longer just a logistical problem to be rescheduled. It carries a direct payroll obligation that did not exist in the same defined way before. Productions and event companies that have not started factoring this into their budgets and their risk planning are already behind.
The Contractor Model Is Under Pressure
The part of this legislation that I think will have the deepest long-term impact is the expanded definition of who qualifies as an employee.
The South African film and events industries have been built almost entirely on a contractor model. Camera operators, gaffers, riggers, sound engineers, makeup artists, production assistants, runners: nearly everyone below the line has been engaged as an independent contractor. That structure suited the project-based nature of the work. It also, frankly, suited the businesses engaging them, because contractors carried their own risk.
Section 50A of the BCEA and Schedule 11 of the LRA introduce a presumption of employment. What that means practically is that if a production company or event organiser exercises meaningful control over how a person works, their hours, their location, their equipment, their conduct on site, the legal default is that the relationship is one of employment, regardless of what the contract document says.
This is not a minor adjustment. It requires production and event businesses to look honestly at their engagement practices and ask whether the contracts they have been issuing actually reflect the relationships they have been operating. In many cases, I suspect they do not.
The question that now needs answering is not whether a contractor agreement was signed. It is whether the actual day-to-day working relationship would satisfy the test for independent contractor status under the new definition. Those are very different questions.
From an underwriting perspective, this matters because employment relationships carry a fundamentally different liability profile from contractor relationships. The risk attached to a workforce change when that workforce is, legally speaking, your workforce. Brokers advising clients in this sector need to understand that distinction clearly, because it affects the nature of the cover conversation significantly.
Disputes Are About to Become Easier to Pursue
Something else that has not received enough attention in the industry conversation around these bills is what the strengthened CCMA enforcement provisions actually mean at a practical level.
Historically, a crew member with a grievance, an unpaid day, or a cancelled shift they were not compensated for faced a process that was slow, uncertain, and difficult to navigate without legal support. The practical barriers meant that many legitimate complaints were simply never pursued. That kept dispute numbers artificially low and gave some businesses a false sense of their compliance exposure.
The proposed amendments change the calculus. The CCMA gains expanded powers to enforce compliance orders, treat unpaid wage disputes as arbitration awards, and deal with harassment claims across a broader definition than sexual harassment alone. The process becomes more accessible and the outcomes more enforceable.
What this means for the risk profile of businesses operating in this sector is that once these amendments are implemented, the frequency of formal disputes is likely to increase. Not because workers are suddenly more aggrieved, but because the path to resolution has become more navigable. That has direct implications for how productions and events need to document their engagements. Call sheets, written particulars of employment, cancellation records, timesheets: these have always mattered. They now matter more, and in a more legally consequential way. From a broker’s perspective, this is a useful conversation to be having with clients well before a dispute arises.
The Budget Conversation Has to Change
In my conversations with brokers about production and event risk, the discussion has traditionally centred on physical loss, liability, and equipment. Those remain important. But the legislative changes we are discussing here add a layer of workforce-related financial exposure that most production budgets and event financial plans do not currently account for.
A venue failure or a weather cancellation used to mean rescheduling costs, supplier penalties, and logistics headaches. Under the new framework, those same scenarios can also generate crew compensation obligations for workers who had been properly notified and were available to work. That is a different and larger number than most people are currently planning for.
This is why the conversation around event cancellation coverage and production insurance needs to evolve alongside the legislative environment. The risk being managed has become more layered. The financial exposure from a single disruption now spreads across more categories than it did before. Cover structures that were designed around an older risk picture may not fully address what businesses in this sector are actually carrying today. That is a gap worth examining carefully.
The Transition Is Where the Exposure Lives
The comment period is closed. The bills are moving. For the film and events sector, the question is no longer whether to engage with these changes but how quickly the gap can be closed between where operations currently sit and where the law now expects them to be.
That gap is not the same for everyone. Some production companies have already begun reviewing their contractor frameworks. Some event businesses have quietly started updating their engagement documents. But many have not, and those businesses are carrying more exposure than they realise, not because they are operating in bad faith, but because the pace of legislative change has outrun the pace of operational adjustment.
Contracts need to be reviewed against the new employment definition. Budget templates need to account for cancellation-related payroll obligations. Documentation practices need to be tightened at every level from pre-production through wrap. And the insurance arrangements sitting underneath all of that need to reflect the actual risk profile of the business as it exists today, not as it existed two or three years ago. These are exactly the kinds of conversations that brokers who specialise in this space are well placed to be leading right now.
A Fairer Industry, and What It Takes to Get There
The goal of this legislation is a fairer industry, and I support that goal. Better conditions for crew, clearer obligations for employers, more accessible dispute resolution: these are outcomes worth working toward, and they will, over time, produce a more stable and professional operating environment for everyone in this space.
But good intentions do not eliminate transition risk. The businesses that navigate this well will be the ones whose advisors treated the legislative shift as a genuine operational prompt rather than a compliance footnote. The insurance conversation, the contract conversation, the risk planning conversation: none of these happens in isolation anymore. They are connected, and the legislative changes now make that connection impossible to ignore.
The industry has always found a way through. Getting this transition right just requires the right conversations happening early enough to make a difference.
About the Author:
Denise Hattingh is the Founder and Managing Director of KEU Underwriting Managers, a specialist underwriting manager serving the South African film and events industries. KEU is distributed exclusively through authorised financial services providers.
