By Pete Murray, NUJ vice president

The jobs carnage across the media in the UK has now triggered a vote for strike action among one of the largest single groups of journalists in the UK.

NUJ members at the BBC have voted by 77% to take industrial action against compulsory redundancies – beginning with two strike days on the 3 and 9 April. 

At the heart of the campaign is the threat to dozens of jobs at the south Asia service at the BBC World Service, where bosses intend to “offshore” the work of researching, writing, presenting and producing live news programmes from London to offices in India, Pakistan and Nepal.

The scandalous proposal – it may even be illegal in India, according to a senior government official in New Delhi – and the sacking of NUJ members which BBC bosses want to impose embodies a repulsive “go back where you came from” attitude that sounds more akin to the nazi BNP than the BBC.

The BBC union reps who met yesterday to decide on the timing of strike action resolved firmly that such racist hounding of our members will never be tolerated.

So, defence of the World Service will be at the heart of the NUJ campaign to fight redundancies at the BBC. But it is clear other NUJ members are under threat.

There is growing concern that management are poised to impose new mergers and job cuts at the corporation’s main newsgathering centre in west London, in what could be one of the largest single culls of journalist jobs since director general Mark Thompson launched his slash-and-burn attack on the BBC at the end of 2004.

It is right that the focus of the campaign is on preserving jobs and journalism at the BBC.

But the strike vote gives BBC workers a first chance in more than four years to register their anger, whether it is over pay and pensions, the mortally dangerous plan to merge BBC and ITV news operations in Wales and the English regions, the refusal to broadcast the DEC Gaza appeal, or even management’s craven inability to come to the public defence of the disabled children’s TV presenter Cerrie Burnell.

Such a broad range of grievances gives activists a vital opportunity to link the BBC action with campaigns at regional newspapers and with other industrial battles.

So the tasks for NUJ Left members are to immediately:

• Contact NUJ reps at your nearest BBC newsroom to offer support
• Agitate for and help build public meetings in main BBC centres – for example, London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Belfast, Cardiff, Glasgow – to bring together print and broadcasting journalists with other local strikers and stewards’ networks, preferably ahead of the national demonstration for jobs and justice in London on 28 March
• Stress the importance of building a community campaign around the BBC strike issues, especially among south Asian ethnic minority communities to support the campaign against off-shoring
• Where possible, encourage your own political organisations to hold either a caucus or a public/branch meeting to discuss the jobs crisis in our industry in an effort to learn from other campaigns.

Posted by NUJ Left

Tags: ballot, BBC, cuts, industrial action, job cuts, National Union of Journalists, NUJ, NUJ Left, strike