01 November 2005
Commentary
Reflections on CBC management’s
Heritage
testimony
Canadian
Media Guild | TNG Canada
Local 30213
By Lise Lareau
National President
I’ll never forget the feeling of
sitting there in room 269 of the West Block in Ottawa, listening
to the team of senior managers try to defend the lockout.
Not only did they mislead the committee about why they feel
they had no choice but to lock us out, they did it with us
staring right at them. That type of “we are right no
matter where the truth lies” attitude explains the
lockout in ways that actual words cannot.
The challenge now is to get the CBC moving
forward again. The Guild is asking to appear before the Heritage
Committee to set the record straight and more important,
to talk about what we would do to get management and employee
relations back on track. (Though the CBC managers were asked
several times about this by Heritage Committee members, they
did not answer.)
Since the return to work, CBC managers
have, by and large, adopted an attitude that “the lockout is over, and
we will go on as if it never happened.” Some are trying
to revise history by calling it a “strike/lockout.” Others
are openly antagonistic and combative with Guild officials.
It’s how NOT to repair relations after a labour dispute.
We need to jointly develop a plan
of how to work together again. We need to heal a relationship
that was sick even before the lockout. The culture of obfuscation,
withholding of information, refusing to deal with conflicts
before they get to a litigious stage, favouritism – those
are the ingredients in a recipe for a poisonous workplace
that must be changed.
How do we achieve that? There’s no question it will
be difficult – almost impossible – if the main
players who masterminded the lockout stay in their positions.
But we do not control those decisions. Another possibility
is for the main players to be ordered by the Board to sign
on to a program of constructive relationship building. It
would include several steps:
1. A meeting between top management and union officials
in a facilitated environment, possibly with several members
of the Board present, to discuss how the culture can be changed.
2. Out of the discussions, the parties would sign a public
document indicating steps they agree to take to do so.
3. Both parties would reveal how
much they spend battling each other and pledge to try to
cut those costs by a certain percentage. Both sides would
have to agree to be open with their numbers. (The Guild’s numbers are part of its
annually approved budget. The CBC’s numbers are never
revealed.)
4. Both parties would have to agree to a timetable for review
of progress, which would be made public.
These are some thoughts, which can
be developed further. But something along these lines has
to take place, because senior management’s appearance before the Heritage
Committee suggested to me that the war on employees didn’t
end when we came back to work; it simply moved into a new
phase.
There are other troubling signs,
too. It was equally distressing to hear that CBC management
has made no moves to discuss next year’s Parliamentary
appropriation with the government. Although Robert Rabinovitch
and his team are fully aware the CBC is under-funded, they
never appear to do the necessary work to secure the additional
money they say they need.
At the same time, they now claim they have no money left
over after the lockout. The claim is not credible. We know
they saved about $40 million in salaries. They could not
have spent that amount on security, management bonuses (inflated
though they were) and start-up advertising. We hope that
Parliament gets to the bottom of CBC spending during the
lockout. An audit is probably our best hope of getting those
answers.
And there remains one essential question.
How could Rabinovitch justify locking us out “because we believed the union
would go on strike in October during hockey or possibly an
election”? The CBC controlled the timing. It pulled
the plug on talks in May to force an August deadline date.
We reacted by taking a strike vote in July, which has a
60-day limit. Our strike vote would have expired in the
first week of September, long before October. All this
is spelled out in the Canada Labour Code. In any case,
why wasn’t option 3 considered: bargaining past the
Aug. 15 deadline for another three weeks before the strike
vote expired. It would have provided some necessary pressure
on the parties to deal. If it had been serious bargaining,
we would have been close to the deal we eventually got
by the beginning of September, close enough to call off
a dispute.
But this is a senior management team that only dealt with
us in a fair way when they were absolutely forced to: after
a seven-week lockout, with Labour Minister Joe Fontana
staring them down and Hockey Night
in Canada’s timeline
ticking. That’s the culture that has to change, in
the interest of public broadcasting in this country.
(This story first appeared on the Canadian
Media Guild web site.)
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