Behind the stage, 18-hour days: what festival crews are reporting

It is two in the morning. The last guest left hours ago and you are back at the hotel going over the day. At the venue, someone from the technical crew is still coiling cables. Early tomorrow, that same crew will be back on their feet for the get-out.

You have seen it many times. What we rarely see is how many hours those days add up to, or how the people working them experience them. Bectu, the UK union for behind-the-scenes workers in media and entertainment, has put numbers on what goes on behind the stage at festivals.

What the crews are saying

During the 2025 festival season, Bectu gathered 79 reports from workers at 54 different UK festivals. They are collected in its Better Festivals campaign briefing. The workers chose to send them in, so they do not represent the whole sector. But some things come up again and again.

In those reports, many workers describe days of 12 to 18 hours, with minimal rest and inadequate breaks. When Bectu sorted them by topic, that came out on top: hours and workload, in 29 reports. Next, with 25 each, came food and catering, and communication and supervision.

The same briefing also covers what behind-the-scenes workers said in a survey run by the union. 70% reported long hours, and some report days of 18 to 20 hours. One worker says they had only 3 hours off between one long shift and the next.

The tiredness is not only physical. Nearly half of those who answered that survey say health, safety and welfare problems on site affected their mental health. 3 in 10 have faced a risk to their physical safety, such as working at height without proper training or equipment. And 35% were unclear about who to tell if they saw a safety problem.

Nor is this a one-summer story. Half of those surveyed said they felt unsafe ‘sometimes’ or ‘usually’ while working at UK festivals in 2024. And 1 in 5 believe conditions have got worse over the past five years.

The view from the company side

Now look at it from the other side. ESSA, the UK association of event suppliers and service companies, asked events businesses about their staff in its Stronger Together survey. Asked to pick their top three challenges in keeping staff, 87% chose work-life balance. 60% named a high-pressure environment. And 37% named people leaving the events industry altogether. Meanwhile, only 29% offer mental wellbeing support, such as an Employee Assistance Programme.

The two surveys are not comparable. One asks businesses across the supply chain. The other gathers the voices of festival technicians and crew. But they point to the same place from opposite ends: those working on site describe days that are very hard to sustain, and companies admit that work-life balance is what they struggle with most when it comes to keeping their people.

It is not all complaints

Bectu also received 11 broadly positive responses that mentioned only small issues. The report does not tell us what those festivals had in common. But the list of complaints does show where to look: hours, rest, food and who is in charge when something goes wrong.

None of that is a mystery. These are production decisions: how long a shift lasts, what the crew eats, who responds when there is a problem. And many of them land on your desk.

What you can do

You may not run festivals. But if you have overnight builds, a stand that goes up in one night or a gala that finishes late, this applies to you too.

• Put rest into the schedule. If the get-out starts when dinner ends and the next build begins first thing, count the hours in between. If the numbers do not add up, the problem is the schedule, not the crew.
• Treat crew food as part of production. It is one of the topics that comes up most often in the reports. Proper food, on time and enough of it for long shifts.
• Make sure everyone knows who to call. A name and a phone number at the start-of-shift briefing or on the accreditation pass is a simple way to make sure nobody is left wondering.
• Ask your suppliers. When you hire technical production, ask how they organise shifts and handovers. It is as fair a question as asking about the budget.

The crew who build your event are part of it too. The audience does not see them. You do, and you often have a say in how long their day lasts.

Before you use these figures in a presentation, keep in mind where they come from. Some come from a union campaign, with reports sent in voluntarily and the union’s own survey, and the others from a survey of businesses. If you want to know how to read this kind of data, you may find Forecast or result? How to read an events industry figure useful. Every figure in this article comes from Athena, Sinapser’s free search engine for events industry studies, where you can check each study and its page.

---

At Sinapser we help event teams work with data and AI. If you want to organise your team’s work better, let’s talk.