Staff Strike at BBC Ends

Staff of BBC complained of bullying in the workplace, work overload and job cuts. It seems their complaints are not heard so they staged a 12-hour strike on March 28. It’s a good thing the strike has ended immediately. The walkout disrupted several programs of the BBC including their news bulletins, and cancellation of other programs including “Newsnight” at BBC2, World Tonight and “PM” at Radio 4. Some scheduled broadcasts were replaced with pre-recorded programs.

The walkout was a follow-up of the strike they staged on February 18. The striking workforce was composed of technicians and journalists who are members of Bectu and the National Union of Journalists or NUJ. The protests are about the DQF or the Delivering Quality First program of the broadcast station, which would entail the loss of 2,000 jobs over a five-year period. Most of those who will be affected by the program will be laid off through voluntary redundancy although compulsory redundancy had already affected 110 employees.

Unions versus BBC

The management of BBC made apologies to their viewers for the disruption in programming. The company is looking for quality programming and budget cuts to increase savings. The unions are protesting that the loss of personnel is already creating high stress and additional workload to the remaining staff. General Secretary of Bectu, Gerry Morrissey commented that the BBC thinks it can get the same level of quality programming with lesser staff. On the other hand, the General Secretary of the NUJ, Michelle Stanistreet, said that the workers’ message is very clear – that the management of the BBC must address the problems they themselves created because of their badly-implemented job cuts.

Union representatives have asked the broadcast station for a six-month moratorium on the job cuts so that workplace issues could be reviewed but the BBC would not budge. The unions have also submitted a workplace harassment and bullying dossier to Dinah Rose QC, head of Respect at Work, the internal BBC inquiry.

A spokesman for the BBC said that they had constructive meetings with the unions during the past few weeks but they could not give in to the moratorium on job cuts that they requested, although they agree that everybody is concerned about the workload and the stress. He added further that everybody should understand the issues on the high pressures of working round-the-clock in a digital environment and the implementation of savings. Likewise, it is best that the unions, individuals and their managers should address the issues at hand.