The boss of the Bectu union has urged British broadcasters to have an “open and honest conversation about what the future looks like” with the ailing freelance workforce, while revealing concerns over future U.S. strike action.
Positing that the UK TV industry’s freelance community is currently at its lowest ebb since she took over five years ago, Philippa Childs called for “openness and clarity” from the likes of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, which may end in some freelancers having to leave the industry as the sector is pressured by a weak license fee settlement and the ongoing advertising recession.
“What really concerns me is that the solutions the broadcasters have come out with have been giving money to the Film & TV Charity to pay grants and providing training, and I think what freelancers probably want is an open and honest conversation about what the future looks like,” Childs said during the Q&A section of a Royal Television Society keynote.
“There might be work for people to do [outside the industry] so people should be able to make a decision about what they want to do. The immediate future will be tricky and [freelancers] could potentially find something else [outside the industry] in the interim.”
Childs acknowledged she has a dialogue with broadcasters, revealing that BBC Chief Operating Officer David Pembrey recently reached out to her to say “the next phase of our conversations have got to be about solutions.”
“The BBC have been relatively open about the fact there is less money in terms of the license fee settlement, which means less production and harder choices,” she added. “From my perspective we are seeing broadcasters buying tried and tested formulas and perhaps not being as open to trying new stuff.”
Beyond the broadcasters, Childs said there needs to be “a little more honesty when encouraging people to come into this industry, and I’d encourage everyone to be a bit more honest about the challenges as well as the positives.”
When times are good, such as the boom period in 2021, she said the industry doesn’t “horizon gaze enough” in order to futureproof when things worsen.
As an example, she said the Screen Sectors Skills Task Force launched last year to close the “burgeoning disconnect” between the UK’s physical production workforce and demand for skills now appears somewhat “out of touch” with the realities of the sector.
Childs added: “There will always be support needed in terms of training and we need to make sure we have skills for the future, but I feel the priority at the moment is how to make sure people survive and thrive in this industry and how not to lose all the gains that we have made in terms of diversity.”
Childs was speaking as Bectu published research that found 68% of the freelance community are currently out of work, with 37% saying they are planning to leave the industry within the next five years.
The 68% figure is a slight fall on the damning previous survey’s 74% six months ago but that was heavily impacted by the U.S. labor strikes.
“It seems that U.S. writers really were on strike during their dispute, not secretly writing their next masterpiece, and that along with the impact of the strike on budgets and timescales has had a bigger impact on inward investment than might have been anticipated,” she said.
“Difficult tightrope”
Looking back, she reflected on how the U.S. strikes had created a “difficult tightrope” for her members to walk across for many months, as they struggled with a severe loss of work while showing solidarity to sister unions across the pond.
“It was a difficult situation for all of us,” she added. “What concerns me a little bit about the situation was the feeling that you’re always going to have to resolve a dispute, but this one took so long.”
The months-long walkouts also “set an expectation in the States that you probably have to take strike action to get everything you can get from employers,” Childs added, which she said will likely rear its head again when below-the-line union IATSE takes to the negotiating table with the AMPTP later this year.
But rather than a further loss of work, Childs posited that IATSE’s action could lead to a boon for the UK if productions are moved to the nation. “But again it’s difficult from our perspective because we don’t want to effectively be ‘scabbing’ on our counterparts in the U.S.,” she added. When IATSE nearly struck in 2021, Bectu gave its 40,000-person member base a clear instruction to “do nothing to undermine the IATSE action.”
During the wide-ranging keynote chaired by Deadline, Childs also chided the streamers for “operating globally and yet not taking the same responsibility as the broadcasters have to their workforce.”
“They will abide by our agreements but getting them to talk to us is quite difficult,” she added. “That is the experience globally.”
Deadline revealed last month that British actors union Equity has so-called ‘side letter’ deals with the big streamers but they rarely come to the table.
