Russell Smith in the Globe and Mail has called the CBC The Iron Rice Bowl. That, according to the BBC was a Maoist “idiom referring to the system of guaranteed lifetime employment in state enterprises.”

The Edmonton Sun sneers

Apparently, young employees are always asking the union to help them find permanent positions. "We are talking about the next generation of the CBC," Amber said. "We are a family, and the family goes from generation to generation."
Time for a reality check. Guaranteed employment has gone the way of the dinosaurs (unless you work at the CBC or in some other unionized environment).

Isn't it interesting how many people who claim to be in favour of the marketplace ignore it?

What these critics are ignoring is the reality of the marketplace for young talent in Canada in 2005.

This surprise, surprise, is not the 1970s when I was in journalism school, this is not the 1980s when The Journal was the most innovative TV news program anywhere in the world.

I have seen the change in the newsrooms of both CBC and CTV and when I was journalism instructor at Ryerson.Ask any senior producer, either at the CBC or in the private sector television and they will tell how hard it is to keep good young people these days. Journalism no longer has the glamour it had 20 years ago.

Most of young people today are not prepared to wait around for the phone to ring. They are not going to tolerate short term contract after short term contract. They are not going to stay in roach-infested apartments while their friends from university are buying condos.

I have seen really talented young people who I knew when I was at CTV in the 1990s, at CBC in the past decade and when I was teaching at Ryerson get tired of knocking their heads against the brick wall. They don't wait like many of my generation. The rate of people leaving is much higher than it was in the past.

Others like another former student don't even to apply to the Main Stream Media, they start their own successful websites.

Knowledgeable recruiters for school boards across Canada are leaping for joy right now. No matter what happens in the CBC dispute, they know that frustrated young people (like a couple of my former students) will be going to teachers college. And then there's law school, grad school and MBA programs.

Media bean counters have never had a long term view. In the 1990s, many media organizations had a double ended layoff policy. Older workers were given packages and younger workers were sent out the door.

Short term gain, long term stupidity. Why has the media lost the younger audience? At least in news it is because those young voices were sent out the door ten to fifteen years ago, the editorial assistants and junior reporters who would have told their seniors: "hey this is an issue..” Or “hey my friends don't think like that.”

Now no one is looking to the future.

Hey guys! Wake up! Boomers like me are going to be retiring in great numbers in the next five to fifteen years.

Schools and universities are desperate to replace the retiring boomers.

The media,meanwhile, in both the public and private sectors, counts beans, and lets many of the best and brightest go to teachers college and law school, ignoring their long term staffing. Of course when there are gaps in the newsrooms a decade from now, the marketplace will set the demands. It will be a seller's market and talent will demand and get the money they want.

But who cares, all the current managers—and it doesn't matter again whether they are in the private sector or public—will be long gone. Let the next guys handle it.

Related link added at 21:47 Aug 18
A post from the yougeek.ca blog where
Darryl MacLeod talks about his own experience. Brief excerpt:

Most of these temp employees will work for two or three years.. with the hope of getting on full-time eventually. When they don't, they will either move on to other employers or leave the broadcasting industry altogether like I did.

I was a temp aka "casual" employee at various CBC locations for over twelve years. I worked all the crappy shifts (some starting at 4:30AM), often with little or no notice. It was like I was on-call twenty four hours a day.

7:09 PM posted by Robin Rowland  
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