I'm an apprentice member of my local. Recently a company we have a contract for reached out regarding my availability. I spoke to my call steward and several others in the office who all know this company and individual, and all are very busy and have given me pieces of the puzzle regarding setting my rates how to arrange payroll for side gigs, but most don't have the time to handhold right now.

So I've been told that when being approached directly there are several options, all of which are allowed:

1. work under the existing IATSE contract with it's stipulations etc.
2. name your own rate, either hourly or dayrate, but have them run the payroll through the hall
3. name your own rate, either hourly or dayrate, and have them payroll you through themselves
4. draw up a white contract with your own details and submit it through the hall employer, and run payroll through the hall under a side contract

So this all still seems pretty confusing to me. What's the best option? I would think that I should name my own rate, and run payroll through the hall, but I'm super confused about how that works for the employer. Does my 4% and benefits just get subtracted from that total amount, pretax?

Can anyone help me understand sort of 'standard practice' when it comes to this kind of arrangement?

This company is going to be reaching out to me for more skilled work eventually (I'm a video tech doing gfx, playback, td/switcher, etc), however on this job I'm just setting up several monitors for an event, loading up some content that will be playing in the background, so it's more just labor. That being said, I don't want to choose the wrong format for the relationship and be paying for it later down the line!

Any help is greatly appreciated! I need to give them some sort of answer on this today.