We are a diverse nation and need to reflect that in the choice of programmes we provide. But diversity of programming only comes with investment. ‘Public Service Broadcasting refers to TV programmes that are broadcast for the public benefit rather than for purely commercial purposes.’ according to OfCOM.

The logic follows that if PBS programmes are to be made than they must be subsidised, the decision to make them can not be a purely commercial one. And that commercial companies (Ch3/5) need encouragement and budgets to allow for a quality of production that will attract viewers.

Press reports for a long time now keep describing Channel’s 3 and 5 as ‘embattled’. The Euro crisis, new technologies, the bank crisis all make their advertising revenue base more like the shifting sands of a mirage than the financial system planners like to have.

They’ve been cutting costs madly to stay where they are financially. Our members have taken the brunt of that cost cutting.

The acception, of course, to profits down is BSkyB whose reported net profits in 2010 was £878 on an income of £1,173 up from 2009’s figures of before tax profit of £456 and net profit of £259.

So the satellite broadcasting, broadband and telephony service companies are making good money. We can all understand why News Corporation wanted a greater share.

BSkyB is the broadcaster that is exempt from European Union broadcasting requirement to make TV programmes. So the company with the most money has little or no PBS responsiblity or programming.

An interesting statistic reported in the Guardian in October 2011 is that the average customer spend for Sky is £535 a year. Our licence fees are £145.50. So we pay, with our licence fees, the PBS to make programmes and then pay up to 3.5 times that to Sky to watch them.

The jobs and the quality for money are in that licence fee. Sky is sending it’s profits to organisations such as News Corporation, who are using it to lobby politicians the ensure that they have the regulatory environment that continues those profits.

We need quality Public Service programmes. We need good documentaries. We need good news programmes, international, national and local.

A levy on ‘pay television’ could fund those fundamental services that have made some of the best programmes in the world. We need for ITV to continue to be a strong player in providing PSB content and need a regulatory system that supports them.

We especially need for strong PSB providers in the nations and regions.

BECTU supports the idea that a one per cent levy on ‘pay television’ which would yield a significant amount of money that can be used to support PBS programming. Twenty-two out of twenty-seven European Union members have a levy system. The UK is one of only five that does not.

That means for a 40 hour week the pay would be £243.20. And as you can see by other articles in this issue, BECTU is really serious about ensuring that new entrants into the creative industries are not exploited with “internships” or “work experience” that entails working all the hours in the day for no pay, not even the Minimum Wage.

But when does a new entrant become a skilled professional? Particularly when we can show in case after case that new entrants are bringing skills from courses and training to their “internships” and that even six months or a year of “work experience” is not considered enough for a “skilled” grade.

This is part of the battle to ensure at least the minimum wage but BECTU’s minimum aim is a Living Wage.

A skilled professional should be able to get a Living Wage for the hours they work. The definition says that in developed nations, such as the United Kingdom, a Living Wage means that persons working a 40 hour week, with no additional income, should be able to afford decent housing, food, utilities, transport, health care and recreation.

Our industries have challenged this model for years but the pressures are increasing. For one thing the idea of a 40 hour week for most is a distant ‘historical’ practice.

Even for our permanently employed members the culture of presentism pushes the 40 hours up. And with ‘availability’ a big issue with job assessments, workers commitment’s to hours pushes most of us beyond 40 per week.

The hours issues is especially important to our members with family/caring responsibilities. Or even those that just want a life outside of their work commitments. I am sure it is why 5,000 women chose to leave the industry between 2006 and 2009 compared to 750 men.

I am sure that the number would be significantly less if the wages in our industry reached the dizzy heights of a Family Wage.

Family Wage is a concept that goes back to the 18th and 19th century when the model was of the nuclear family. The belief was that one wage should be able to raise a family. In the 18th century they figured out that when workers couldn’t get a Family Wage for their work, they delayed having families, had smaller ones, or none at all.

Leaving the wealthy to have the large ones. It is certainly a pattern I’ve seen among our freelance members and an issue raised at Women’s Conference.

I would argue that a Family Wage now means that our members should earn enough to support themselves and their family commitments. And that this would sustain many more of us in this industry.

We are a highly skilled group of people that work in exciting and challenging industries. The U.K. Film Council’s report “The Economic Impact of the UK Film Industry” says that in 2009 there were 36,000 of us working directly and 100,000 other jobs and that 58% of us were university educated.

Jobs and wages that support family responsibilities are jobs and wages that support a sustainable industry where skills don’t disappear, that maintain a quality of production that keeps the UK in the forefront of creative locations.

The UK Film Council reports that films depicting the UK generates around a tenth of the overseas tourism revenue, totaling around £1.9 billion a year in income.

The Arts Council has shown that theatres also generate a serious amount of income both within London and locally.

To sustain a vibrant and skilled community of workers in the creative industries we need for all to have wages that encourage our members at the different stages of their career life to believe “Hey I can make a life and a living out of this job”.

BECTU and members of the Creative Coalition Campaign are pleased that one of the key means of the free downloading of the films and television programmes that we work on will become more difficult.

It has been reported that the U.K. film/tv industry lost approximately 1/2 billion pounds in 2008 to illegal downloading and copying.

Even a small percentage of that could fund a number of independent productions.

That money will not come back to our industry but instead in part go to businesses that steer people to sites that will get them the product for free.

Court documents show that Newzbin earned more than £1 million in 2009 by charging members 30p a week access. (That’s a lot of members!)

What they provided members was ‘editors’ who sorted through the piecemeal binary sites that hosted parts of copyrighted productions and collected the information and packaged it in files that were easy to access.

To my mind this isn’t passively making sure that freedom of access is available to all but actively ensuring that they can sell products they don’t own.

What the court has ruled is that BT must censor access to Newzbin2 recommending that BT use Cleanfeed software that was developed to stop access to child pornography sites.

The original site Newzbin was closed down in 2010 when a judge ordered it to take down links to copyrighted film and television programmes, even though Newzbin claimed it had no awareness of copyright infringement.

All this is not very believable. As soon as Newzbin could not access copyrighted films and television the site closed clearly no longer able to provide it’s ‘members’ the service they paid for to be resurrected as Newzbin2.

The BBC reported in an interview with Newzbin2 spokesperson ‘Mr White’ that Newzbin2 would ensure “continuity to our U.K. users” if the ruling went against them.

Mr White is reported as saying “Our users don’t wish Cleanfeed to work and based on a preliminary technical assessment we think it will be trivially breakable. We have the sand, and if needed we will pour it in Cleanfeed’s engine oil.”

I have problems with businesses that believe their right to sell members the ability to watch a film for 30p a week is more important than controlling the marketing of abuse of children.

Closing off access to websites via the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is controversial. It is a change of tactics by the big rights holders like the MPA but is called for, they believe because, “It is the result of not being able to identify and enforce action against offshore sites – nobody knows who they are run by or exactly where they are based,”. Newzbin2 was reported as partially being hosted in Sweden.

Closing off sites could be a dangerous tool. This debate is a complex one for sure and I have sympathy with members who say we need to develop business plans for distribution methods that challenge the piracy of films and television programmes, not just block internet access use.

But none of this will be easy or simple.

It is a complex issue but the answer isn’t to just let business that profit from our members work but by there activity ensure that there is less work survive. There is no clear and simple path to solve this problem but actions need to be taken and we need to and will monitor the results.

As a final aside, according to the BBC report it was the MPA that provided to court the information that Newzbin has around 700,000 members and generates an income in excess of £1m per year. ‘Mr White’ denies this.

“We make enough money for strippers and Jack Daniels but Ferraris may be some way off,” he said.

Newzbin2, a company that will threatens to break software that blocks access to child pornography showing the rape and abuse of children and has enough money to support strippers. I am not impressed.

All of these are a part of becoming an activist in BECTU and Annual Conference is the time each year that the union needs you the most.

We need you to set the agenda, make the decisions, discuss the issues and to meet, chat, enjoy your friends and colleagues.

These are the key experiences of conference and the formal structure that can seem so intimidating is just there to make the time spent fair and as efficient as possible.

This yearʼs conference is a Rule’s Revision Conference where rule changes from Branches and the National Executive Committee are put to the members to vote on.

The rule changes can be fundamental to the aims of the union or simple housekeeping to ensure clarity of the Rules.

The rule changes allow the union to stay ontemporary.

The next key decisions are the propositions which talk to the aims and goals of the union in the years coming.

It was through a vote at conference that the union decided to employ a special official for training and to have a Womenʼs Conference.

Propositions can come from the NEC or from branches. The NEC will have a view on all of the motions. Well you did elect us to have opinions and to pay attention to how the union is run!

The NEC will have someone speak on each. They will support it, oppose it, or ask for it to be ‘remittedʼ.

When the NEC asks for remission, the President (thatʼs me) will ask, before the Branch delegate speaks proposing the motion, whether the Branch is willing to remit the motion.

If the proposition is remitted, the NEC has undertaken to look at the proposition and work as best they can for its aims, in full or in part, and they will report back to next yearʼs Conference.

We take the various parts of the Annual Report in blocks and ask delegates that want to speak to paragraphs of the Report to inform the Standing Orders Committee before the conference begins.

This has sped up the running of Conference and allowed time for workshops.

This year it will mean that we can have both an Annual and Rules Conference in the same day, but it is this discipline that ensure that we get to all of the propositions.

So we need you to read the document before you arrive (not like my usual
which is reading the night before the meeting) and contact the SOC to tell them if you want to comment on a paragraph.

We know that we have a lot of work to get through and Iʼm warning you that we have the facility to add another thirty or more minutes onto Conference to finish business.

This is a simple explanation of the workings of our Annual Conference.

But BECTU wants to make the time we have and the money spent as interesting and useful as possible by streamlining presentations and giving time to workshops.

The workshops are a great way to learn, discuss with others and raise questions about the issues facing our industry in an informal setting.

In years past we have held ones on new entrants and training, digital copyright, and BECTUʼs website.

This years we are holding two: organising for the next 20 yearsʼ and representing members with the new Equality Act.

This will be my first time chairing an Annual Conference. I know that there are some great people around me to ensure that I run the Conference well. My aims are to facilitate the members to have a fair and democratic discussions on the issues of our union.

Iʼm looking forward to Conference. Iʼm looking forward to meeting delegates and finding out what interest them; at working hard to bring the union forward and relaxing hard with all my friends, new and old.

See you there.

One was being asked to take on a role – surprise, surprise as secretary – and the mentoring and friendships made on my branch committee, and later on divisional committee.

Another was participating and learning about the union at Women’s Conferences.

Looking back, the most important reason was being asked to participate. All the others flowed from that.

We recruit members and retain members when we ask: ask them to join; ask you to help with a simple task; ask people to an event, a training day, or a freelance fair.

BECTU provides a number of avenues for learning about the union and developing your skills as a union representative. The training department run an impressive array of courses under the two broad headings of “Trade Union Education” and “Vocational Education”. Some are brought to your region or workplace, some are held in head office.

Training is a vibrant and exciting service of the union to its members. One of the easiest answers to colleagues not yet in the union who ask what it provides is: “Look at our Training Courses. Any of them will help you increase your skills.”

BECTU has also recognised the unique issues facing women working in our industries. A survey of the media industry by Skillset, the Sector Skills Council for the Creative Media Industries, showed that 5000 women left the industry between 2006 and 2009. In that period just 750 men left.

A majority of the women were in their thirties: by my reading, women who had a number of years of skilled work behind them and for various reasons were finding the industry to difficult to stay in.

BECTU believes that finding and supporting these women before they leave the industry will insure that we have an industry that takes equality seriously. It’s why we hold a Women’s Conferences – which have also been key to increasing the number of women active in the union, on branches, in Divisions and at Annual Conference.

I believe also it has been a very successful tool at retaining women in the union. A lot of those women who left the industry did so because of redundancies and a shrinking workforce.

We know that there are tough times ahead, especially for freelance members.

That brings me to BECTU’s central role, which is to fight the industrial issues for all members: to go for the best pay and conditions and working environment.

Most of the major employers want to shed permanent employees and have a freelance workforce. BECTU has been fighting hard, and with successes, to bring a fair and equitable working environment to the freelance market.

Our signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the BBC for a Freelance Agreement has been a hard-fought win. We aim to improve the working environment of our members working for the BBC as freelancers and to set a national standard of pay and conditions.

As part of this Memorandum, a standardised recognition agreement and process have also been agreed, to deal with pay, hours and holidays where BECTU can demonstrate they have at least 35 per cent of a workforce in membership.

BECTU’s ability to demonstrate membership to managements is key. It is key to our wining improvements; to our ability to represent members; to our survival as a union.

In my experience some non-members assume the industrial benefits will come to them, whether they join the union or not.

But if we don’t reach that magic number of 35 per cent we won’t be able to negotiate under that BBC Memorandum of Understanding – and pay, hours and holidays will fall behind, for them too.

We need our members to say to those who want the benefits but don’t want to pay the dues that their idea of a free ride risks making things worse for everyone, not just them.

And for those who just haven’t thought about it yet, we need to just start asking everyone, “Have you joined BECTU yet? We need you, to make sure we can all get this better deal.”

The Conservatives clearly have no commitment to the arts in our communities and nations.

They talked of maintaining a vibrant cultural sector – but in the
nine commitments they put forward for the field of Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport there were but two goals for culture: to maintain free entry to national museums and galleries and to “cut red tape to encourage the performance of more live music”. Those were bleak and limited goals if the target was indeed a vibrant culture.

Yet there are many studies demonstrating that investment in the arts reaps benefits in jobs, economic growth, increased government revenue – and, especially, a quality of life that positions communities to become active members of the 21st-century creative economy.

We are hearing from all quarters that the way forward is through a “knowledge economy”: but a key part of the knowledge must be creative. To build their skills to compete in the global economy, creative practitioners must practice, and to practice they need to work!

The study Arts and Economic Prosperity, from Americans for the Arts, shows that across the US every $1 invested by local, state and federal government is returned 7 times.

The Arts Council of England, along with other arts and heritage organisations, launched Cultural Capital – A Manifesto for the Future on 1 April this year. Its subtitle is “Investing in culture will build Britain’s social and economic recovery”.

It is an intelligent and reasoned argument of the value of the arts to the economy of the country. It was launched with much fanfare: but little seems to have come of it.

The Coalition Government seems to wants to drip-feed its cuts and reorganisations. I might be being cynical here, but this does make it very difficult for high profile campaigns.

Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and former director of the National Theatre, said at an awards ceremony on 28 November: “I feel really ill at the thought of 50 years being thrown away.” He believes that the attitude of the government is that the arts can be cut because they are successful and says “We’ve got to make noises, loud noises…”

Our members in theatres and arts centres are worried, rightly. The government’s attitude seems to be, “Go and find yourself a patron. We can fund our arts like they do in America.”

But some top philanthropists have said this won’t work. For one thing, we don’t have the tax laws to encourage donations on the scale necessary. For another, if we are talking about funding, tickets to a Broadway show can be more than £80 and the top price for the Metropolitan Opera in New York can be £270 – though the Metropolitan Opera is the most-endowed arts organisations in the world, it says that donations are down.

Sir Nicholas Hynter, the present National Theatre director, has said,
“The National Theatre’s production of War Horse, which is generating a great deal of revenue for both us and the private sector, would have been impossible without sustained investment allowing us to create it over the course of 18 months of workshops.”

Mr Murdoch is quoted in the Guardian as saying that a free society “required an independent press: turbulent, inquiring, bustling and free. That’s why our journalism is hard-driving and questioning of authority. And so are our journalists.” It was reported that the speech was given in front of at least five cabinet ministers.

In the United States, four of the next Republican Party hopefuls for the 2012 Presidential elections work for one news organisation: Fox News, part of the Murdoch’s News Corporation empire. This has been stirring up a lot of controversy lately, with the debate reaching the New York Times and Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman.

Kicking off the discussions was a long and thoughtful article in Politico.com pointing out that the four Republican Party hopefuls were Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee. Fox News employs them as paid contributors and they have contracts forbidding them from appearing on any TV network but Fox.

So not only is Fox News paying them and giving them a platform to speak directly to voters, Politico.com reports that producers at C-Span, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC all report they were told they must get Fox’s permission to interview candidates, when these broadcasters wanted ‘to practice some hard-driving and questioning’ journalism. And that permission has been denied by Fox.

The only TV news organisation’s journalist allowed to interview the potential candidates are their colleagues at Fox. Sarah Palin especially seems to be wedded to the station.

“Speak through Fox News” is Palin’s advice offered to ‘Tea Party’ backed Senatorial candidate, Christine O’Donnell, (the one who admitted to “dabbling in witchcraft” but also says “God is the reason I’m running”). Not surprisingly Palin’s advice was given on a Fox programme.

Candidates not employed by Fox are concerned. Politico.com quotes one aide “I wish we could get that much airtime, but, oh yeah, we don’t get a paycheck”.

In the UK we have (Murdoch owned) News of the World’s ‘hard-driving journalism’ ending with the journalist in jail for illegal wire tapping. And we have the hard-driving organisation wanting to take over full control of BSkyB.

Murdoch still seems to see himself as the David fighting the Goliaths of the world. He is quoted as saying, “When the upstart is too successful, somehow the old interests surface, and restrictions on growth are proposed or imposed. That’s an issue for my company.”

I find it very hard to see his ‘company’ as upstarts. He has major news paper chains in five countries including Australia, the US and UK.

He has major broadcasting throughout the world and ties and tentacles into almost any market that might be profitable.

What concerns me is his ‘economic model’: that belief that the bottom line is not ‘questioning of authority’ but ensuring that a company is always placed to influence those who have a say in regulating the industry – whether by hiring potential Presidents or having senior ex-staff as key advisors in government.

He must be pleased with this government’s decision to cut funding to the BBC by 16% and announcing major redundancy in the regulator Ofcom. It is surely a living legacy of Thatcher’s policies, cut, cut, cut.

I think I said this last time but I will say it again. These might be tough times but if we work together, keep the important issues on the table, talk to our friends and colleagues and participate in our union, we can make a difference.

It is as a union that we can challenge this rising tide that applauds devastating cuts.

BECTU’s first motion was composited with five other motions calling for a campaign to repeal the anti-trade union laws left from the Thatcher era. It is pathetic that 13 years of a Labour government allowed the laws and the restrictions they place on trade unions to be still in place. These laws especially attack trade unions abilities to hold legitimate strike actions, giving employers and the courts powers unprecedented in Europe.

You will probably remember the use BA put them to when it twice took injunctions to stop strikes, both times when the ballots questioned would have made no difference to ballot outcome.

The second time, in May of this year, because the union Unite did not use all means to tell members that there were 11 spoilt ballot papers out of a ballot of some 11,600 members.

Our colleagues in the NUJ were facing a similar injunction on the same day in May when their strike was halted because the employer’s claim that Johnston Press employed no journalists, despite a Johnston Press stamp on pay slips, the Johnston Press company handbook staff are issued, the JP grievance, disciplinary and health and safety policies that journalists are required to abide by. Johnston Press plc annual report even claims they employ 6,500 staff including journalists.

But when the NUJ challenged pay freezes, pension scheme closures, and the introduction of new technologies, Johnson Press claimed a multitude of subsidiary companies were the employers, not they, even though local managers have no powers to change these decisions.

These laws are allowing employers to overturn the democratic decisions of union members. No member takes the decision to strike lightly but it is an important tool. Especially in these times if the easy option is to change fundamentally the terms and conditions your employees work under, then that is the option employers will take.

We clearly see that the BBC is taking an easier option out of their pension problems but it is an issue with our freelance members too.

Freelance, short term/fixed term contracts all find it all but impossible to confront employers. Our experience is that once a serious dispute is raised for those working on these contracts, the minimum time from initiating an industrial dispute to being able to take action is 3 weeks. When your contract is for a few days or weeks, you have to either quit or just accept the conditions. This means that job after job an employer can impose unfair work practices but the issues can’t faced collectively.

Collective actions are how unions protect members. We work in an industry where all of us are concerned to be viewed as trouble makers. By working together we lesson the impact on all of us. And we need all the tools we have to fight the plans of the Con-Dem Government and its plans for the devastation of the public sector.

It is when we work collectively, it is when we challenge wrongs with as broad a campaign as possible that we can succeed. Hard times are not necessarily bad times if we can work collectively to challenge threats. Good luck to our colleagues in the BBC with their campaign ahead.

The BBC’s proposals are more like a 6.5 quake that has the potential to set off a tsunami than the tweaking of figures. It shifts the playing field for all, newcomers, middle managers, end of career techs. And by our calculations all will loose out. The feeling is they really don’t want you in their pension scheme.

The BBC Board are doing this at a time when the 50 top executives, including the director-general, are receiving a pension top-up payment of over £1 million this year. The top eleven executives cost £4.8 in total remunerations: Mark Thompson, D.G. £834,000; Mark Byford, Deputy D.G. £485,000; Jana Bennett, Director, Vision, £515,00; Zarin Patel, C.F.O., £429,000; Peter Salmon, Director, BBC North, £430,000. These figures are from the BBC’s website. I could keep going but it gets really depressing.

A management that will do anything it can to avoid a cap on executives pensions while saying the 19,000 staff members must shoulder the hard times by having there final salary pension scheme ended for new members and for existing staff their “final salary” calculation can only increase by 1% of whatever salary they are on April 1 2011 (April Fools Day) is cynical and greedy.

Members have asked how this fundamental, the calculation of what their salary is, of a final salary pension scheme can change?

We’ve had legal advice that it can be done because the employer defines what is salary for ‘pensionable calculations’. So when you joined a scheme thinking as you gained in skill and experience and were rewarded with the pay compensating for the work, this would lead to a comfortable retirement you were wrong (unless you make it into that top 50).

Remember too that pensions are described as pay deferred. If this scheme goes ahead your pay will be attacked from two fronts; pay freezes, token increases and less in your pension.

Also interesting is that the plan is proposed to start from the 1st of December 2010. As of May the BBC expected to be hiring over 500 for new jobs in Salford Quays, many from the 1st January 2011, the numbers probably increased by the latest announcement of the Breakfast Show moving to Salford too.

They really are ensuring the new employees or employees with a short time working need have no loyalty to an employer that puts it’s staff at such a disadvantage. We need to recruit so that when we confront management we can do it from a position of strength.

Make sure you vote in the ballot for strike action and that the ballot arrives in head office by the 1st of September. BECTU needs to know your views and to have the power of your vote behind them.

But it was not just a funding source. The UK Film Council was also there to promote and develop the British film industry.

That the Con-Dem government thought so little of the film industry that it would axe a major support body without consultation sends dangerous messages around the world. Film financing and producing is a long haul business. We’ve seen before that the threat to tax incentives can lead to a bad employment year.

The film industry bucked trends in the last years to show steady growth in revenue and in film attendance. This means employment. And employment means taxes are paid.

Is this government so enamoured of making sure government is ‘small’ that it will rush it’s way into destroying hard realised gains?

Unfortunately the answer is turning out to be yes.