The Department for Opportunities – the Social Mobility Foundation’s campaigning arm – has launched its second campaign to raise awareness of the class pay gap this Halloween.
Partnering with Creature London, the foundation has created a short horror film to explore classism in the workplace and to encourage employers to measure, report and close the class pay gap.
Featuring Michael Socha, Jo Hartley and Jonathan Hyde, the ‘Stay Down’ film is set in a typical corporate office and sees the working class protagonist battle against subversive discrimination despite doing everything expected of him.
The spot, directed by Thomas James and produced by OB management, dramatises the ‘insidious unseen nature of classism’ as a sinister presence. The hero’s boss is an elitist that wears the working-class colleague down physically and mentally while strangely sparing others around him from his judgment.
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The film, that includes Radiohead’s No Surprises, at first appears to be a trailer for a horror film but it is later revealed that the campaign is quite the contrary. The messaging ‘Some Horrors aren’t fiction. Classism is still holding people down,’ tells the viewer all they need to know.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the barriers faced by people from a working-class background are horrifying. With this campaign we’re not just pastiching the horror film genre, we’re dramatising people’s actual reality: and it’s a reality that has never been more damaging, and unacceptable,” Creature London chief creative officer, Stu Outhwaite-Noel, said.
The trailer will be aired cinemas across the UK and will be supported by film posters on digital out-of-home (OOH) and in print in this Halloween’s Guardian on Sunday.
Social Mobility Foundation Department for Opportunities CEO, Sarah Atkinson, added: “The very existence of a class pay gap is horrifying. Our campaign is designed to shock employers into action, particularly the creative and arts sectors, which have so much work to do.
Our organisation focuses on practical action that drives positive outcomes; any employer who sees the campaign should get in touch because together, we can end the horror of workplace classism.”
