BECTU are another good resource for people looking to work in the broadcasting/TV industries. I’d highly recommend membership to anyone who’s serious about working in sound, lighting, video etc as a freelancer, as they offer very cheap public liability insurance (many companies require that contract staff have this, and it is also a sensible thing to have in case you accidentally fry/drop something on a punter and need to cover your arse), and good discounts on all sorts of useful training courses – e.g. I’m doing some training on BS7909 (temporary power for events) in a few weeks reduced from £400 to £200 for members. Also a union is generally a good thing to be a part of, and especially useful for threatening piss-takers with who take ages to pay your invoices (they soon cough up)!
The media industry is notorious for taking the piss with wages, and the use of ‘internships’ (in ‘quotes’, since they rarely lead to any job, and are thus internships in the loosest possible sense) is part of the reason why the media is full of the types of upper-middle-class toffs who can afford to spend their early twenties working in various unpaid roles ‘for the experience’ or ‘to look good on the CV’.
Luckily these sorts of internships are not so common in the industry I work in, but there still exists the same problem of lots of keen young people eager to work for minimum wage (or less!), in addition to lots of small/start-up sound/lighting companies who can’t afford to pay all of their crew day-rates as they need to compete with all the other little sound/lighting companies in the local area. I’ve been on both sides of this issue, both as a badly-paid crew-member working for experience, and as a production manager for a small company needing to use low-paid staff to deliver a competitive quote.
The long-and-short of it is that it’s a crowded marketplace, both in terms of labour and companies competing for work. This means that, at least at the smaller end of the industry, the company who ends up winning the job is often the one who have undercut the competition by slashing their operating costs as much as possible (sometimes at the expense of things like health & safety), and the staff are paid a shit wage. All a bit of a bunfight really.
All I can say to anyone looking to ‘get a foot in the door’ is to do low-paid work by all means – realistically you’ll need to, but be mindful of any bogus internships or offers of work ‘that will look really great on your CV!..’ unless you can actually get something useful out of them for your own gain. Aim to become business-minded in the way you deal with companies – they are selling your services and making money from you, so it’s only reasonable that you get a fair wage in return – what you feel is a fair wage depends on how you value your own services, but the freelance fees guides posted seem like a good place to start.
My tuppence anyway, as someone who’s only really broken completely free of badly-paid crewing/warehouse work over the last few years.
