Advert producers face union dispute

Trouble is brewing over travel payments to union members working on commercials.

BECTU has this week referred an argument about travel time to ACAS, the government conciliation body. Under the union's agreement with the Advertising Producers' Association (APA) a meeting must now take place with the employers, overseen by ACAS.

The dispute, over payment of travel time to crews working long days, has been simmering since BECTU agreed changes to its agreement with the APA last year.

New payment rules, accepted by the union after last year's negotiations, allowed companies making commercials to deduct one hour from paid travel time at the beginning and end of each working day.

Previously the agreement had allowed employers to deduct only 30 minutes from journeys to and from location. However, the union insisted that the agreement should include a clause which obliged production companies to pay overtime rates for all time spent travelling home after crews have worked long days.

Commercial shoots traditionally start early, and the definition of a "long day" was a schedule which either finishes after midnight, or involves more than 4.5 hours of overtime on top of the basic day.

Disagreements about interpretation of the travel clause began rumbling soon after the revised agreement came into effect last autumn, with crews who had worked long days being refused payment for the first hour of their journeys home.

Union negotiators believed that this breached the new agreement, and the dispute came to a head at a routine BECTU/APA liaison meeting on April 11, where the employers were warned that ACAS would be called in.

The union is now waiting for ACAS to set a date for a meeting where an independent conciliator will try to broker a deal to settle the dispute between the union and the APA.