Growing Our Collective Voice: Bectu Conference 2025
- Jul 1
- 2 min read
The biennial national conference of Bectu took place in York between 17-18th May.
The conference opened with Division meetings. Our division was mostly focused on Trump’s tariffs. Whether these will actually come into being, with what terms and how they will be enforced is uncertain and unpredictable, which makes it difficult to address them in a significant manner at this stage.
The union however has already sent members updates on this and has produced a statement. Bectu is always communicating with the UK government and other bodies such as the European UNI MEI and the American guilds and unions such as IATSE, which communicated to us that while they would like to encourage US productions and crew, they would not be doing so in a manner that deliberately hurts global production.
Motions at conference covered many ground and topics, from regulation and organisation of the union itself (ie. keeping london production division and regional production divisions separate, electing our Head of Sector), to asking for the union to focus on addressing issues in the workplace (ie. fashion staff rights, improving air quality at live events, addressing AI’s threats to the environment and to copyrights, etc.), to take action in addressing broader political issues (ie. supporting protests against the far-right, condemning Israel’s targeted assassinations of Palestinian journalists, protecting trans workers’ rights).
The agenda of the conference and a record of decisions including which motions were passed and rejected will be provided to members, so sign up now to find out more!
Notable motions included:
PR 18 Membership Retention Strategy
PR 19 & 20 Change divisional structure of LPD and RPD (not carried)
PR 28 & RP 3 Bectu members threatened for Gaza support; Protesting media workers killed in Gaza
PR 31 Industrial strategy (better rights for freelancers; tackle late payments)
PR 33 Support for freelance creative workers between contracts
PR 36 & 39 Artificial Intelligence
PR 41 Solidarity with peaceful anti-fascist and anti-racist movements
RP 13 Electing the Head of Bectu (rejected by SOC, readmitted, not carried)
CEP 1 Solidarity with trans colleagues
Come to our next Branch Meeting on Wednesday the 2nd of July at 7:30pm at Bectu HQ to find out more. You can attend in person or online and can sign up below.
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