Striking With BBC Radio Leicester

Today on a freezing picket line in Leicester, BBC workers came out on strike to oppose “compulsory redundancies, excessive workloads and bullying and harassment within the corporation.”

With union membership growing as a result of recent strike action, members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and BECTU, the UK’s media and entertainment trade union, walked out of work at noon today “to begin a 12-hour strike against a damaging cost-cutting scheme imposed by management.”

Kindly, this time round the Leicester Mercury ran a story outlining the details of the strike action; something they failed to do when the workers at BBC Radio Leicester were forced to undertake a 24-hour strike last month.

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said the strike action “should send a strong message to Tony Hall, the incoming director general [of the BBC], that we need to have to put a stop to the cuts so we can sit down and have a proper discussion to address the issues. We cannot have a situation where members are paying for the BBC’s cuts with their health.”

Here Stanistreet is referring to the “toxic legacy” of the former director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, whose “disastrous licence fee settlement in 2010 led the BBC to announce 2000 job cuts under a policy misleadingly labelled Delivering Quality First (DQF).

One might hope that Tony Hall will endeavor to work closely with the NUJ and BECTU to resolve his employees serious concerns. One might even hope that Hall will approach his new position at the BBC with the zeal he applies to his charitable concerns, as he is a trustee of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation — a well-endowed philanthropy which according to their web site works to help the disadvantaged by “mak[ing] grants to organisations which aim to maximise opportunities for individuals to experience a full quality of life, both now and in the future.”

However, leaving hope aside, it is safe to say that such charitable concern for the disadvantaged on Hall’s part is unlikely to translate into him actually treating his workers well at the BBC: that is, to “maximise opportunities” for his employees “to experience a full quality of life, both now and in the future.” [1]

This is because Hall’s charitable work is carried out (and is really only necessary) precisely because his fellow trustees at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation work so hard in the business world to force down the pay and conditions of the working class. Thus other hard-headed trustees of the foundation include the likes of the vice chairman of Rothschild’s (Anthony Salz), and the former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International (Tim Bunting) — the latter of whom one might add is also a board member of the controversial healthcare vulture, Care Holdings.

This is precisely why today’s strike action was so necessary, and why members of the NUJ and BECTU will have to maintain the pressure on their bosses until their eminently reasonable demands have been met… which, of course, they will continue to do, with their unions growing in strength by the day.

Notes

[1] A similar local example on this issue is provided by the chairman of 2 Sisters Food Group, who months after brutally attacking the livelihoods of his workers at their RF Brookes factory in Leicester (and across the country) was appointed the chairman of the British Red Cross.