Stage, Screen & Radio - December/January 2015 - 12

Martin Spence

Union man

On his 60th birthday on 26 October, Martin Spence retired
as BECTU's assistant General Secretary. Janice Turner
talks to Martin about his life working for the union.

MARK DIMMOCK / MARK DIMMOCK / RONALD GRANT ARCHIVE

A

fter 30 years in the industry
and the union, BECTU's
assistant General Secretary
Martin Spence has retired
on his 60th birthday.
It was Martin's trade union activity
and commitment to the labour
movement that led to his first job
in audiovisual production.
Born in south London, Martin
went to university in Durham and
then moved a few miles up the road
to Newcastle. In 1979 he got a job in
the city's socialist bookshop, Days of
Hope. "The shop's name was taken
from Ken Loach's controversial TV
series, set in the period from the First
World War to the General Strike," he
says. He joined the shopworkers'
union USDAW and was soon its
delegate to Newcastle Trades Council.
In 1984 he was recruited by Trade
Films, one of the companies set up
under the visionary Workshop
Declaration, organised by BECTU's
forerunner union the ACTT and
Channel 4 as a way to bring underrepresented groups into the industry.
"Trade Films was actively engaged
with the trade union movement, and
before I joined they had helped
produce the Miners Campaign Tapes
in support of the NUM. This was the
year of the miners' strike, remember.
Trade wanted to build on that with a
longterm project of labour movement
film and video production."
They were looking for a researcher
with knowledge of the local trade
union movement, and they picked
Martin. "I think my work with the
Trades Council helped: it put me in
contact with other unions in the city
and further afield."
When he joined Trade Martin also
joined the ACTT and inevitably started
to get involved in union activity. He
became a delegate to the Regional
Division committee and General
Council in 1986, and was elected to
the final executive committee in the
run-up to amalgamation in 1991.
With the formation of BECTU he
continued to be active in the Regional

12

Production Division and became chair
around 1993.
Martin was at Trade Films for about
10 years, mainly working on the labour
movement video project Northern
Newsreel. In 1994 Martin went freelance
as a researcher, producer, lecturer and
writer. Then in 1996 he came to work
at BECTU on a one-year contract, as
a national official in the LPD team.
It was only a couple of years before
he became the supervisory official for
both LPD and RPD, and then in 2001
he became acting assistant General
Secretary. In January 2003 he was
elected to the post unopposed.
TRIUMPHS

Looking back, what did Martin consider
some of his greatest moments?
"The construction crews dispute
in 2003 was one," he says. "It was a
formal collective agreement with
PACT as the representative of the
US studios for freelance construction
crews. Their pay had been static and
their hours had been increasing for
several years.
"Hundreds of construction workers
were all prepared to walk off their
jobs and all the films in production
would have been hit. They all had
resignation letters ready to send in.
When the employers realised they
really would do it, they agreed to talks.
"As a result we have achieved
consistent pay rises most years
between 2003 going right through
to 2017. We've just signed a new
three-year agreement which allows for
a 2.5% pay rise each year until 2017.
"And the working week is now
established as a 37.5 hour week ,
whereas in 2003 it was 50 hours.
Martin was also proud of the way the
freelance and permanently employed
workers at the BBC had worked
together to deliver a whole set of new
arrangements for the benefit of
freelances. "It was a great example of us
all working together as one union," he
says, though "it's work in progress."
Negotiations with PACT have been
a thread running through Martin's life

What I
argued for
years was
the need
for bespoke
agreements
for the
different
sectors
where PACT
companies
employ
BECTU
freelances

- and it remains unfinished business.
"The crucial thing that we're doing,
and I've been arguing this for a
decade, is that we are moving away
from the old relationship with PACT
which was based on a single freelance
agreement that aspired to cover the
whole of film production and the
whole of independent television
production," he says. "The Freelance
Production Agreement was never able
to cover the whole range of all
production. It aspired to be a one-sizefits-all agreement but it ended up
fitting nothing. So what I argued for
years was that we needed bespoke
agreements for the different sectors
where PACT member companies
employ BECTU freelance members.
The construction crews agreement
was one example, and an attempt was
made in TV factual production in 2008.
The talks about film are another
attempt, and PACT has also invited us
to talk to them about a freelance TV
drama agreement. That body of work
is just getting under way. So maybe

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