BBC Staff Strikes Over Changes to Pension Plan

[Blue_Tires]

Source: NYT

LONDON — Journalists at the British Broadcasting Corp. started a 48-hour strike Friday morning to protest planned pension cuts, causing some disruption to global programming.

About 4,100 BBC journalists, who are members of the National Union of Journalists, participated in the strike, or about 17 percent of the staff. Several live programs — ranging from the BBC World Service’s “The World Today” program to the local breakfast show, “Good Morning Scotland” — were replaced with pre-recorded shows.

The BBC director general Mark Thompson acknowledged that it “has been a difficult period” for BBC staff. “However, the people who lose out most in any strike action are the very people we are here to serve — our audiences,” he wrote on the BBC Web site on Friday.

The strikers are fighting a plan by BBC’s management that seeks to plug a pension funding gap, estimated at £1.5 billion, or $2.4 billion, without increasing fees for the BBC audience in Britain.

The union charged on its Web site that the new plan would result in BBC staff “paying more in contributions and working longer and getting less in retirement.” The change “fails BBC staff,” the N.U.J. general secretary Jeremy Dear said earlier this week.

The need to fill gaps in the schedule also lead to some awkward program choices. BBC World Television replayed an old program celebrating the third anniversary of the Airbus A380 — just a day after an engine failure forced a Qantas Airbus A380 to make an emergency landing.

The BBC said it anticipates “some disruption to the schedule” and apologized to its audience. BBC World Service has also been affected, though a spokesman said it was running a “near normal output.” The strike had no impact on its Web site so far, it said.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/business/media/06bbc.html?src=busln

[snot]

1. Seems odd; isn't the BBC funded by taxes on tv watching? Have people been watching less?

I've actually been worried about the BBC since 2005, when the following little-publicized changes (among others) were made (my description from back then, based on the BBC's own "Greenpaper"):

1. The BBC's current governing body is to be replaced by a Trust. The trust members are to be recommended by the Prime Minister.

This sounds reasonable, until you consider that the Prime Minister has been in direct conflict with the BBC over its reporting on him.

2. More programming is to be privatized. C.f. the U.S. use of private contractors in Iraq, or in its electronic election technology--by no means perfectly similar, but illustrates the dangers.

3. The Trust is supposed to be made more responsive to the desires of the public. (Nevermind that, as I understand, 3/4 of the public was perfectly happy with the BBC sans any of these changes.) The public's wishes are to be assessed through research. The paper doesn't address who will do this research or what was wrong with the old research.