CBC lockout and public broadcasting
By Susan Ferguson
Thank you, CBC workers. Your threat to picket the ceremonial swearing in of Canada’s new Governor General kept the airways free of such stupefying pomp and circumstance in the latter days of an eight-week lockout.
Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to be less sanguine about the lockout of 5,500 CBC and Radio-Canada workers – virtually everyone involved in producing, airing and scheduling its TV and radio shows outside of Quebec and Moncton. The most important being management’s push for a more “flexible” workforce. Despite real gains for the union, management did indeed achieve its objective in a down-to-the-wire compromise with the Canadian Media Guild (CMG): the proportion of full-time contract workers will rise from its current 5% to 9.5% of the permanent staff of 3780.
Where the CMG succeeded was in improving provisions for contract workers and the 1000 or so casual, temporary workers at the broadcaster. Among other things, the union prevented management from undermining seniority rights and won the right for contract and casual workers to convert to permanent staff over time (after four years for contract workers and 18 months for casuals).
Most significantly, the lockout helped break down the division within the CMG between technical staff (who tend to be more union-conscious) and journalists (who tend to see themselves more as “professionals” than as “workers”). The split in the ranks that management believed would undermine the union never materialized, lending the union negotiators much needed strength at the bargaining table.
Yet there is the troublesome development of the cap itself. Prior to the deal, CBC and Radio-Canada were required to consult the Guild about new contract positions. The 9.5% cap is of course much lower than management’s stated goal of no limit, but it’s unlikely the top brass really believed they would get that. And the thing about setting limits is that they can be stretched. If you give them an inch . . .
There’s little reason to doubt management won’t push for that mile in the next round of negotiations. Insecure and flexible workforces are nothing new in the media, including at CBC and Radio-Canada. The lockout was really a case, as one picketer said to a Globe and Mail reporter, of them sticking the knife in a little deeper than it already was.
Support for the locked out workers was considerable. Much of it, however, pandered to a creepy, white-washed nationalism, in which the dispute represented a threat to our “Canadian way of life.” In this view, public broadcasting is essentially a means of promoting national identity, the glue connecting Newfoundland fishers to Ontario immigrant nannies and Alberta oil magnates – deepening everybody’s appreciation of each other and creating a sense of community greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, since the beginning, that nationalist vision has systematically excluded the voices of people of colour, women, Aboriginal Peoples, working people and, in English Canada, Quebecers.
A better basis for support is that a “flexible” workforce undermines the broadcaster’s mandate to deliver programming in the public interest. That requires taking risks that might offend advertisers and those in power – risks that someone looking to renew a three-month or one-year contract is unlikely to take.
Public Broadcasting Potential
The potential for public broadcasting to be a powerful means of democratic communication and a celebration of creativity can’t be denied. Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, for example, has sprouted some 30 radio stations in recent years. Freed from commercial restraints, journalists, artists and others can express themselves without worry of censorship from big business or government.
Still, let’s be clear: the CBC and Radio Canada are hardly vibrant examples of such broadcasting. Ottawa’s low level of funding (less than one per cent of GDP, much lower than the amount spent in Britain, France, Germany and even the US) has drained CBC/Radio Canada of the resources to produce timely, hard-hitting and entertaining programs and forced them to compete with commercial stations.
And it’s an intensely competitive marketplace. With five corporations accounting for 84 percent of the business, Canada has one of the most concentrated media sectors in the world.
Job insecurity is becoming the norm. Frequent “makeovers” of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations have led to considerable layoffs and the spread of precarious employment in the private sector over the last ten years. Those who remain find their workload intensified. Reporters and writers, for instance, now file more stories, more quickly than ever before.
Convergence (the term describing companies with stakes in more than one media, such as TV, telecommunications and print) means they’re also expected to contribute to web sites and make television appearances for their sister organizations. As their work intensifies, they have even less time to chase down a story and the “news” is often hastily gathered, cribbed straight from company or government news releases.
In this sense, the workers affected by the CBC lockout symbolize a much broader trend. That the conflict took place at CBC/Radio Canada, however, puts the question of public broadcasting on the table.
On that issue, US media critic Robert McChesney makes an important point. So long as the commercial media exist side by side with public media, the latter will be squeezed for money and relegated to filling in the holes in the programming provided by commercial media. Inevitably, that means keeping a respectful attitude toward government (who ultimately pays the bills); emphasizing information over entertainment (laudable, but often boring); and, in cases where fundraising pays some of the bills, serving the well-to-do. “Broadcasting,” writes McChesney, “has to be removed from the marketplace altogether to begin to fulfill its social promise.”
In the meantime, any attacks on the scraps of public broadcasting that now exist have to be fended off – for the sake of the workers first and foremost, but for the sake of the airways too.
