CBC ‘Locked out’ web site
p2pnet.net News:- The CBC, Canada’s national broadcaster, now has a pirate web site. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist ; )
“CBC management has wilfully taken your favourite shows and personalities off the air,” it says. “We lament the choice it has made. We love our work and we value our relationship with you, our audience.”
What’s it all about?
The CBC has, “locked out hosts, writers, producers, reporters, technicians, camera operators, set designers, researchers and all the administrative workers who support them,” says CBC On The Line. “It has done this because it wants to turn most of the CBC workforce into temps.”
Head over to the CBC site proper and you’d never guess there’s a major labour dispute going on. There’s nary a headline. It’s obvious there’s something amiss at CBC radio, on the other hand. It’s featuring little but re-runs and apologies. There are attempts at current news stories, but not from any of the familiar names.
The CBC may be trying to pretend it isn’t happening, but the Great Locked Out want to make sure everyone knows what’s going on.
“Tired of picket duty?” – it asks. “Wish you were back behind a computer? CBC On The Line is looking for submissions from across the country.”
And, “”I’m sitting on a curb watching history,” says Adrienne Arsenault, CBC-TV’s Middle East bureau chief. Arsenault, who’d “spent months preparing for the critically important story,” couldn’t file because of the lockout.
The site carries an open letter to Canadian Media Guild members from CMG president Lise Lareau.
Dear members and colleagues:
So it’s come to this.
CBC’s managers are shutting the doors and locking us out of the places where we have devoted so many hours working, reporting, producing, shooting, hosting and creating CBC programming. It seems unthinkable, unnecessary, wasteful.
More than that, this is an aggressive move by any standard. I would call it un-Canadian for a major national employer, a public broadcaster no less, to be locking the door on 5,500 professionals. In retrospect, it would seem that plans were in place to do this all along. It explains the absolute wall that our bargaining committee faced, day after day, on major issues.
This is the work of a small group of senior managers, led by VP of Human Resources George Smith. There have already been five work stoppages at the CBC by various unions in just under seven years. This is the third lockout.
During most of that time, Robert Rabinovitch has been president. This is a legacy that we hope will not go unnoticed in Ottawa.
Under their leadership, the management bargaining committee demanded untenable concessions, overwhelming changes to the way work is done at the CBC. They wanted a workforce that would, over time, become mostly temporary. All in the name of an ill-defined sense of efficiency and “flexibility”. But, in fact, what they seem to want does not exist at any other major broadcaster in this country.
This fight is about an agenda driven by senior managers who are not rooted in the values of public broadcasting. Their focus is on appearing to be efficient to themselves and to another small group of Ottawa bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, the people who actually do the programming and our audiences – in television, radio and online – will suffer. That’s what makes it all so sad.
But we must not get disheartened. We are on the side of reason. Now that we are locked out, we have to rally together to be strong voices for the defese of public broadcasting. We have to make Canadians, who own the CBC collectively, understand and join our fight for the concept of real careers in this industry.
Lise Lareau
National President
Canadian Media Guild
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August 24th, 2005 at 1:46 am
Being far away from home in Newfoundland, Canada, I need to “connect” to my roots to keep up with what is going on. The wealth of news and culture that is uniquely Canadian that is provided by CBC is priceless.
This is another example how executives are cut off from the rest of the planet, living in their little greedy world.
August 24th, 2005 at 5:49 am
Welcome to the corporate world. If you can’t lockstep their tune, there is someone in India willing to do it at far less money. It’s no bargin for the corporation but they see it is the end all to the solution of pay, benefits, and labor problems. Those expenses are just like paying for commodities to use for raw materials in making a product. There is nothing in there for the human factor. One day the corporations will have to wake up to the idea that if no one has a paycheck there will be no customers to buy the product. Surely that is a minor problem, having product that no one buys. Heck the RIAA found an answer for it, prehaps world corporate will follow in those footsteps for its own solution.
August 24th, 2005 at 9:11 pm