Standing up – for yourself, and for each other

BECTU members will be able to stand up for each other more effectively if they know how to stand up for themselves properly, says assistant national secretary Paul Evans.

"After more than a year of campaigning on long-hours working, we’ve been talking to members about where to take the ‘Eyes Half Shut’ campaign next. We’re always keen to move our campaigns on and ‘bullying’ was, sadly, a popular jumping off point for this next step.

"Many of our members tell us that, in their view, while long hours is the symptom, the real illness in our industry is bullying. In many cases, members talk about a low level, institutionalised culture of coercion where precarious freelancers are given non-negotiable working conditions.

"But the more we thought about it, the more we realised that instead of campaigning against bullying, we needed to be working to ensure our members have more flexibility and control over their own lives. We recognised that it’s really about respect at work.

"This means you being able to work on terms that you have negotiated. Good employers treat a ‘hire’ as a win-win bargain. Too often, in film and TV, the attitude is just ‘take it or leave it’.

"Respect should always be given, but it is also something that workers have to insist upon. For example, getting better at negotiating your own terms will increase the amount of respect that you receive. This is important to us as a union, because if TV and film crew are individually bad at negotiating, they are more likely to undermine the efforts of people who are good at negotiating! Negotiating is a skill and the union will work to help more of our members to do it well. In a wider sense, it also means being able to take part in shaping the industry that you work in – to work with colleagues to set the industry norms about simple things like hours, breaks, or overtime.

"All of this is more possible if we can make it easier for you to work with like-minded colleagues to agree some of the terms you will never be able to assert on your own because of fears of ‘undercutting’. BECTU has decades of experience in helping anyone who wants to bring about change to establish a good group of like-minded people who do the same kind of work, and who are prepared to agree a plan of action and stick together on it. We can provide the structures that allow such a group to pick people who will go in with other representatives of workers in the industry to negotiate new agreements and improve existing ones.

"Finally, we come to the raw issue of obvious bad workplace behaviour. Our industry will be better in every way if more people know how to challenge it, in all its forms. Leaving aside the obvious forms of bullying (physical or verbal aggression, harassment, etc), not having an equal partnership with your employers is something that everyone needs to be able to challenge – for the good of the industry. Long-hours working threatens your safety, your health, your productivity and the quality of your work. If you are worried that you will lose work for raising legitimate concerns, you are being bullied. Our campaigning will be geared towards improving the levels of respect at work in our industry.

"For this reason, our 2019 campaigning in the London Production Division will focus on how to stand up for yourself as well as standing up for each other. We’ll be looking at how you can work together more effectively to give everyone a clearer voice in our industry – and we will link this to being able to look after yourself in the first place.

"I hope you’ll join us in making this happen."