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28 April 2005
Guild calls on CBC vice-president
to reconsider
contracting out
Canadian
Media Guild | TNG Canada
Local 30213
CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg was
flooded with questions on contracting out during a townhall
with employees on Wednesday. He did not guarantee there would
be no further moves to farm CBC work out to private firms.
But Stursberg did open the door to rethinking the current
plan to contract out program marketing and publicity work
for English-language services.
“If the business case (for contracting out) was flawed,
we would have to reconsider it. We’d be nitwits if
we didn’t reconsider it,” he told the audience
of several hundred employees from across Canada.
The Canadian Media Guild is demanding that
Stursberg reconsider the plan. The time to do it is now.
The CBC communications department is meeting with private
bidders today and tomorrow to flesh out a deal.
Here are
the top four reasons the CBC business case is flawed:
- It does not compare the straight costs
of keeping publicity work inside the CBC versus contracting
out the same work. The CBC wants less publicity work
done overall. Fine. But CBC managers acknowledged that
they did not calculate the cost of doing that lower volume
of work inside. The Guild would like the opportunity to
put forward a cost-saving plan that keeps the reduced work
in house.
- It does not factor in the loss, when
the 34 CBC employees are let go, of flexibility, knowledge
and the long-term relationships built with journalists.
- The estimated savings of $864,000 per
year do not factor in escalating costs in future years,
once in-house skills are lost. A recent Deloitte Consulting
study reports that the main risk of contracting out is
underestimating how much it is going to cost.
- With all due respect to Stursberg, he was wrong at the
townhall when he suggested that outsourcing program marketing
is like ordering in sandwiches! It is a service, not
a product. Deloitte Consulting pointed out that contracting
out services is more complicated than buying commodities
like sandwiches or telephones from the outside. Companies
worldwide report more problems from outsourcing when a
service is involved.
(This story first appeared on the Canadian
Media Guild web site.)
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