The Stage

BBC staff to consider strikes

Published Thursday 22 November 2007 at 17:10 by Matthew Hemley

BBC staff are to be balloted for strike action in protest of planned compulsory redundancies.

Representatives of Bectu and the National Union of Journalists voted unanimously to ballot its BBC members, of which there are around 10,000, for strike action at a meeting held today in London.

The decision comes after the unions heard that the BBC - which is looking to reduce its workforce by around 1,800 - has refused to rule out selecting people for redundancy, despite the emergence of hundreds of employees who have offered to take voluntary redundancy.

The unions claimed 343 staff had volunteered for redundancy in news, and 303 staff in Vision, the department responsible for all of the BBC’s channels and its in-house programme production, but that management would not guarantee that those who have come forward will be allowed to go.

BBC Vision management have announced they will continue with the process of selecting staff for compulsory redundancy while at the same time considering volunteers as soon as possible, which the unions said amounted to “cherry-picking staff”.

Bectu general secretary Gerry Morrissey said: “The BBC has left us with no option than to ballot our members for strike action. I am confident that we will get an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote and that very successful strike action will take place at the beginning of January.”

Luke Crawley, Bectu assistant general secretary, accused the BBC of failing to see that a “demoralised workforce will find it harder to produce the high quality programmes needed to justify the licence fee”.

Union members will learn in the new year whether or not the strike vote has been successful.

Responding to the news, the BBC said:”It’s difficult to understand, particularly given the very positive position with volunteers in some areas of the BBC where compulsory redundancies are now much less likely, why our unions have decided to ballot for strike action.It’s important to say that the vast majority of staff will not be affected by the proposed job reductions. A strike will inevitably hurt the people who pay for our services. It will not change the overall economics of the BBC. The bottom line is that increasing expenditure in one area means reducing it in another.”