Numerous workers at the state-subsidized Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are locked-out. (Canadians yawn.) Management is doing a dreadful job of covering. The 60-minute prime-time tv news show is reduced to 5 minutes, followed by 55 minutes of the same news from the BBC. Radio news was reduced to covering the progress of the space shuttle from California to Florida.
Now the taxpayer-funded, unionized workers want to become self-employed: "A week after Canada's national broadcaster locked out its union workers, the journalists are laying plans for an independent online news site. The workers hope to have text articles and pictures up by next Monday, with a daily podcast by the following week," reports Ina Fried of CNET.
(Correction notes to Ina Fried:
- don't use the singular: the CBC is one of several national broacasters.
- don't use the plural: CBC employees are represented by several unions; just one is locked out.)
I for one applaud the employee's chance to experience self-employment. I've done that for 14 years, and love the life. OTOH, I do work sometimes 10-16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. I am surprised that it's taking the union two weeks to set up a Web site, and three weeks to start podcasting. I guess they're just not up to the levels of speed and efficiency required to keep self-employed people successful.
Ina Fried's article is filled with wonderful irony. You need to understand that CBC employees are popularly regarded as working "in the bowels of the mother corp" in downtown Toronto. Here are quotes from them emerging, blinking in the sunlight of the Modern Era:
"...union workers know they can't produce the same volume of 24-hour news that they can when they are at their day jobs." And why-the-heck not?
"...this labor dispute could be the first example of broadcast journalists being able to produce their own content, thanks to the lowered cost of the gear needed to produce reports as well as the Internet as a distribution means. 'That's never been possible before'..." a union representative said. Welcome to the Age of the Internet, folks.
The union rep "...readily acknowledges that all the technology in the world doesn't replace the picket line." He fails to understand that technology has already lept over the picket line. I recommend he spend his time on the picket line reading "PowerShift," a pre-Internet book that predicted the shift of power from huge to the small.
The final irony: the lock-out is over the CBC wanting to shift more employees to contact-work (ie, self-employed), while the union feels that no employee should be on contact. And now the union is contacting itself out for the duration of the lock-out.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, for who but a few will read yet-another-news Website?
Update
A more recent Globe&Mail article quotes those union members who realize that the Internet breaks picket lines. A (former) drive-home CBC host, Mark ONeil, had this to say:
"Quite apart from whether we can do it, is whether we should do it? It's been a fascinating debate. Some people are concerned that this is breaking our own picket line in a sense. Others are just concerned about whether it will be good enough."
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