Infringing on Anti Competition Laws with pay Guidance?

[Charmander45]

I am part of an informal group of over 600 freelancers working in the Film and TV and Digital industry. While there are already two industry unions that offer pay guidance in the form of ratecards (for those not familiar with the industry, ratecards offer guidance on what should charge the client per day, depending on your profession, level of seniority and type of work you are undertaking), many of us create content that falls outside of the work that these unions represent, which is limited to more traditional Film and TV production. As a result the ratecards they provide are not appropriate.The result for those people is a high degree of uncertainty around what is an appropriate rate, and we are seeing freelancers undervaluing their work, while also becoming more open to exploitation.

To address this we have formed a committee to help those people by providing some guidance on day rates. However, we have some concerns over the UK’s anti competition laws, specifically the rules on price fixing that state:

‘You must not discuss the prices you’re going to charge your customers with your competitors.
You’ll be breaking the law if you agree with another business:

• to charge the same prices to your customers
• to offer discounts or increase your prices at the same time
• to charge the same fees to intermediaries, for example retailers selling your products’

The rates we would provide would be strictly for guidance only, and provide upper and lower limits, not a fixed figure. However, we would need to conduct some research in order to arrive at these figures. This would take the form of anonymised questionnaires and polling of members. There would be no discussion or naming of individual businesses/clients. It’s also worth mentioning that there are a wide range of different professions reflected in the group, and that any given rate would be suitable for a wide variety of given jobs, and not, for example targeted at specific businesses. For example, there would never be anything like 'If you work for Business A, charge X Amount"

As we are an informal group and not a legal union, would creating this guidance fall foul of anti-competition laws?

Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

[ULA]

Charmander45 have moved your thread to our Welcome forum as this is not an employment law related issue and may get overlooked for a response.