Friday, September 02, 2005
CBC 52: Fort Confusion
(This post could be called an intelligence analysis. It is not traditional, two or more source background journalism. Rather it is based on multiple sources both inside and outside the Toronto Broadcast Centre, reliable and not-so-reliable. It may include disinformation, although I have tried to screen for this. I now know what the intelligence agencies mean by "chatter." Other relevant information may not be available at this time. It is my conclusion about the situation as it exists on the eve of the Labour Day weekend)
Update: Comments and my response added below the report.
It's not Fort Dork, it's Fort Confusion
Summary
There was a scenario for the labour situation at CBC crafted months ago by the Senior Management Committee. It was NOT a plan and now that the scenario hasn't come to the expected conclusion, the operation is in tatters. There is confusion about what to do next.
Unless both sides can craft an interim peace agreement, end the lockout by next week and get the news service up and running to cover the aftermath of the Katrina catastrophe, it is likely that the dispute will go on for months and the CBC will bleed to death.
What happens this weekend will be crucial. The third-hand coverage of Katrina by CBC and the high quality of coverage by CTV has caused immense damage. Regional managers who have been in the cocoon of the Toronto Broadcast Centre go home this weekend. They will return to Toronto next week, perhaps with a different perspective.
Intelligence Analysis
Although some managers inside the Toronto Broadcast Centre have been told that this would go on for months, this is not what others were told.
I thought there might be a detailed plan, but my information now indicates there is no such plan. There is what I believe could be called a playbook, again something created perhaps by CBC HR boss George Smith, perhaps by consultants, or perhaps by both.
The CBC believed that if the militant technicians in CEP merged with the more moderate Guild it would dilute any union militancy at the CBC. The Guild has always reached a compromise in previous negotiations and the Senior Management Committee believed that pressure would mean that members would force the Guild to accept management's demand for concessions on casualization.
The scenario called for pressure on the Guild to build beginning in the spring when the CBC applied for conciliation. If the the Guild would not agree to management on casualization, then a short, sharp lockout would work as "Fred and Krista" wrote: "A quick resolution will be helped by picketers focusing on the reality of their situation." So the scenario called for the lockout to begin in mid-August when ratings were at their lowest; it would teach the employees a lesson in time to reach an agreement and then get back in the buildings in time to make sure Hockey Night In Canada was back in business.
In this scenario, the Guild was expected to begin making concessions by early this, the third week.
Some security guards were told by their supervisors that the job was expected to last "about two or three weeks." CSM and other companies involved are now redeploying personnel. Some location supervisors who were taken from other jobs will return to them in the next few days. They were replaced at those locations by temporary employees, some of them summer students. There may also be summer students at CBC locations. These guards will now be returning to school. Look for new faces among the guards in the coming days.
John Doyle in the Globe and Mail reported that the entertainment shows were told early this week to gear up production for airing in early October. It may be, however, that Doyle's sources were told to do that too early, that the call to the entertainment shows was not based on solid information but on this playbook.
This week, management began an PR offensive with both the public and the union. The public was indifferent. In most cases the op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail by president Robert Rabinovoitch, together with a similar package mailed out to all employees had the opposite affect than management expected. With most, it went over like the proverbial lead balloon.
What some people interpret as CBC arrogance, on closer examination shows that there is a core of CBC employees for whom working there is a vocation, a calling. It these people who sometimes irritate the public and even their fellows at CBC. (And believe me there also are a lot of arrogant people in private broadcasting and even newspapers, I have met some of them).
For many others, including myself, the CBC was one of the few places in this country where good broadcast journalism was encouraged.
This is changing, CTV is beefing up coverage in way that was unimagined when I worked there in the 1990s, (even though the people at CTV at that time did an amazing job with the resources available. Most now are locked out CBC employees).
What went wrong
It is likely that the playbook was based on industrial relations theory as crafted by anti-union consultants. In this scenario, as has happened in brick and mortar industries, older workers tend to protect their jobs, their benefits and pensions at the expense of younger workers. In the end, even the NHLPA folded on this issue. (It still may happen, months from now. Or CBC could "post conditions" and invite people to return to work, but this is a huge gamble, they would have no idea who would return, who would not and what stars and potential stars would say "I don't need this," and go elsewhere).
Senior management at the CBC was out of touch with its workforce. What Robert Rabinovitch and George Smith never bothered to examine and what Richard Stursberg was too new on the scene to really understand was the commitment of the majority of CBC employees to their jobs, to public broadcasting and to quality journalism.
What infuriated the majority of the employees was senior management's condescending attitude toward the work that they have been doing for the past fifteen years since the first Martin deficit busting budget cuts. CBC employees have been flexible, they have adapted, they have innovated, they have come up with new ideas to keep the corporation going.
Despite what the public seems to think, CBC employees also know that over the past fifteen years they have been working harder for less money than other people in the broadcast industry.
None of this mattered to the Senior Management Committee.
The first indication that Rabinovitch had no idea what his employees actually did was his reported irritation at complaints about the compression of the working space so "surplus" could be rented out, no matter how it impacted the actual product that CBC aired.
The second was the continued emphasis on "flexibility," but management's definition of flexibility was nothing more than moving figures from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, not figuring out ways of getting broadcast quality video out of Afghanistan by e-mail.
The other problem is that it is likely that George Smith and other senior managers were working on a non-media, brick and mortar industrial relations strategy. After all employees of Canadian Pacific can't go out and build themselves a railway. Air Canada employees can't go out and in a few weeks start an airline after picking up a couple of 747s and A300s.
Since Smith, Rabinovitch and Stursberg have never actually ever produced anything, they had no idea what their employees could actually do. They likely had no idea of the tradition of the strike newspaper going back more than a century. I doubt if they expected the podcasts, the special broadcasts and the blogs. While those projects are slower than expected getting off the ground and will build slowly, they will be up, running and growing.
The big problem
The big problem, as both my sources tell me and from what I hear from my negotiation-expert relatives is the contract itself. The CBC wanted the two unions to merge to dilute militancy, but with that they also brought the problem of integrating two contracts, the old Guild and CEP contracts plus updating the contract to deal with new conditions.
When Premier Mike Harris decreed the amalgamation of Metro Toronto, it created a huge headache both for the city workers and the school boards. Negotiations to integrate and standardize those contracts went on for years and are still going on as problems are being ironed out.
Although the subcommittees have reached agreements in some areas, the stubborn insistence by the CBC that the Guild concede on the casualization issue has, for weeks, prevented talks on about 40 major areas including money.
That brings us back to the playbook. If the Guild had folded early in the week, then it was expected that there would be concessions on other issues and an agreement in time for Hockey Night in Canada.
There is now no possible way to reach an full contract agreement in time for the debut of Hockey Night In Canada.
Why this weekend is important
The Labour Day weekend is important for two reasons.
Katrina
In the brick and mortar industrial relations model that George Smith is following, a major international catastrophe like Katrina would not be a major factor (unless there was a plant or a rail line in a disaster area).
But for a broadcast and cable network, whose core audience comes to it for news, the third-hand, BBC, recut voiceover coverage is itself a disaster.
This is third or fourth hand but a senior manager has told friends and neighbours, who told me, that NCAN editor-in-chief Tony Burman is livid that his beloved news service that he has worked so hard to build up in the past few years is not on the Katrina front line.
The managers putting together the newscasts for the past three weeks were both tired and depressed by the situation. Then came Katrina. Now three independent sources have told me separately that, with Katrina, that they are becoming exhausted. In normal times, when a disaster like Katrina struck, as occurred on September 11, 2001, CBC News would beef up staff, redeploy reporters and call in all available casuals. Now Katrina has to be handled by a small group of overworked, tired, and often inexperienced managers.
Regional managers are going home for the holiday weekend. They have been living in a cocoon for the past three weeks.
It was reported to me that some of these managers are puzzled at the Guild's "stubborn refusal" to see the reasonableness of the senior management position on casualization.
When they go home, it will be like when MPs leave Ottawa to talk to constituents, or perhaps, even like when a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome is released. They will talk to their families, to their friends and neighbors and perhaps to other CBC employees.
If the managers go home, and see that they could be separated from their families for months to come, and that the Guild position is not unreasonable, then they may return less than thrilled at a continued (what Ouimet called) secondment at gunpoint.
The Kosovo/Katrina factor. A call for a truce.
During the 1999 strike (and that was a strike) by CEP, it became obvious as it went into about the sixth week, that NATO was going to go to war in Kosovo. The people inside the Toronto Broadcast Centre had been putting out newscasts without pictures, although radio was able to do more.
As the military began its moves, the news staff were told that the CBC was also planning to go to cover the war.
Both sides immediately entered serious negotiations and there was a settlement in time for full CBC News and Current Affairs coverage of the war.
A quick settlement is unlikely at this time. The senior managers have been flexing their muscles since 1999, the last three disputes have been lockouts, not strikes.
There appears to be no understanding at the top of the CBC of the role of public broadcasting.
There was likely NO contingency plan for a major disaster like Katrina. (News managers always have contingency plans, but it is clear at this point the Senior Management Committee probably did not even consider something like a Katrina or another major bombing attack)
The famous plan that was waved by Robert Rabinovitch in the 10th Floor Artists' Lounge, mentioned by a couple of bloggers, I am now told by sources, was nothing more than a detailed play list of shows that would be aired months from now. This, to me, is confirmed by what I was told before the lockout by people in the CBC tape library, that each weekend for weeks there were large orders for tapes to be dubbed and sent to a storage facility, to be used in case of a lockout or strike.
One of the columnists said that when Canadians start seeing the Beachcombers, they will know the CBC is in trouble.
We're in trouble.
There has to be an interim truce.
Management has to drop the precondition of total surrender on the casualization issue, start talking, end the lockout, get CBC back on the air and get reporters and crews on planes into the southern United States.
There cannot be negotiated settlement in time for Hockey Night in Canada, even if both sides are in agreement on a lot of issues and locked in the Royal York 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the first week in October. Remember it took Toronto sometimes years to resolve all the issues from amalgamation.
CBC management and the CMG have to find a way to create an interim agreement acceptable to both sides, and as has occurred with agreements on other smaller issues, append that agreement to the current contract. (Extra money would make it all the sweeter) while the major issues are negotiated, perhaps with the help of the new mediator everyone is searching for.
If management continues to stubbornly stick to their bricks and mortar industrial relations strategy, the CBC will slowly bleed to death over coming months.
Reaction on the blogs
From comments posted on CBCunplugged when it linked to this
Anonymous poster
Ouimet takes the opposite view, but agrees with the other post that there are hotheads involved.
And by e-mail
Reply from Robin
Ouimet notes that managers are worried that if the Canadian Media Guild came back in the doors, it could then pull the plug. A key date, therefore, is September 8, when, by law, the strike mandate given to the Guild in the last vote expires. (Interesting that a strike mandate expires, a lockout decision doesn't. But then that's the difference between democracy and dictatorship)
A truce is a truce. A final contract would have a "no strike or lockout" agreement. So could an interim agreement. It would have to be short to keep the negotiators focused. My suggestion is 120 days. That would bring us to sometime in January, with a possible federal election and the Olympics.
That would give advantages to all sides. If things were going badly, the CMG could hold another strike vote; management would be aware that it was winter and both the Prime Minister and the Opposition would know that so far in history only the CBC has blanketed the country during an election. (Of course if we're still out on this round by the election, Robert Hurst at CTV could just hire everyone he needed by setting up a [heated] tent and table on Front Street. Unfortunately it would likely be an election duration only deal)
Remember Samuel Johnson "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." About 120 days would cool the passions, get Don and Ron back on Coach's Corner, give the Senior Management Committee a chance to contemplate the reality of the 21st century media and the Canadian Media Guild wondering what it would be like to be back pounding the pavement in frigid February.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, CBC, blog, news, lockout,
CBClockout
5:15 PM posted by Robin Rowland
Permanent Link
Links to this post
(This post could be called an intelligence analysis. It is not traditional, two or more source background journalism. Rather it is based on multiple sources both inside and outside the Toronto Broadcast Centre, reliable and not-so-reliable. It may include disinformation, although I have tried to screen for this. I now know what the intelligence agencies mean by "chatter." Other relevant information may not be available at this time. It is my conclusion about the situation as it exists on the eve of the Labour Day weekend)
Update: Comments and my response added below the report.
It's not Fort Dork, it's Fort Confusion
Summary
There was a scenario for the labour situation at CBC crafted months ago by the Senior Management Committee. It was NOT a plan and now that the scenario hasn't come to the expected conclusion, the operation is in tatters. There is confusion about what to do next.
Unless both sides can craft an interim peace agreement, end the lockout by next week and get the news service up and running to cover the aftermath of the Katrina catastrophe, it is likely that the dispute will go on for months and the CBC will bleed to death.
What happens this weekend will be crucial. The third-hand coverage of Katrina by CBC and the high quality of coverage by CTV has caused immense damage. Regional managers who have been in the cocoon of the Toronto Broadcast Centre go home this weekend. They will return to Toronto next week, perhaps with a different perspective.
Intelligence Analysis
Although some managers inside the Toronto Broadcast Centre have been told that this would go on for months, this is not what others were told.
I thought there might be a detailed plan, but my information now indicates there is no such plan. There is what I believe could be called a playbook, again something created perhaps by CBC HR boss George Smith, perhaps by consultants, or perhaps by both.
The CBC believed that if the militant technicians in CEP merged with the more moderate Guild it would dilute any union militancy at the CBC. The Guild has always reached a compromise in previous negotiations and the Senior Management Committee believed that pressure would mean that members would force the Guild to accept management's demand for concessions on casualization.
The scenario called for pressure on the Guild to build beginning in the spring when the CBC applied for conciliation. If the the Guild would not agree to management on casualization, then a short, sharp lockout would work as "Fred and Krista" wrote: "A quick resolution will be helped by picketers focusing on the reality of their situation." So the scenario called for the lockout to begin in mid-August when ratings were at their lowest; it would teach the employees a lesson in time to reach an agreement and then get back in the buildings in time to make sure Hockey Night In Canada was back in business.
In this scenario, the Guild was expected to begin making concessions by early this, the third week.
Some security guards were told by their supervisors that the job was expected to last "about two or three weeks." CSM and other companies involved are now redeploying personnel. Some location supervisors who were taken from other jobs will return to them in the next few days. They were replaced at those locations by temporary employees, some of them summer students. There may also be summer students at CBC locations. These guards will now be returning to school. Look for new faces among the guards in the coming days.
John Doyle in the Globe and Mail reported that the entertainment shows were told early this week to gear up production for airing in early October. It may be, however, that Doyle's sources were told to do that too early, that the call to the entertainment shows was not based on solid information but on this playbook.
This week, management began an PR offensive with both the public and the union. The public was indifferent. In most cases the op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail by president Robert Rabinovoitch, together with a similar package mailed out to all employees had the opposite affect than management expected. With most, it went over like the proverbial lead balloon.
What some people interpret as CBC arrogance, on closer examination shows that there is a core of CBC employees for whom working there is a vocation, a calling. It these people who sometimes irritate the public and even their fellows at CBC. (And believe me there also are a lot of arrogant people in private broadcasting and even newspapers, I have met some of them).
For many others, including myself, the CBC was one of the few places in this country where good broadcast journalism was encouraged.
This is changing, CTV is beefing up coverage in way that was unimagined when I worked there in the 1990s, (even though the people at CTV at that time did an amazing job with the resources available. Most now are locked out CBC employees).
What went wrong
It is likely that the playbook was based on industrial relations theory as crafted by anti-union consultants. In this scenario, as has happened in brick and mortar industries, older workers tend to protect their jobs, their benefits and pensions at the expense of younger workers. In the end, even the NHLPA folded on this issue. (It still may happen, months from now. Or CBC could "post conditions" and invite people to return to work, but this is a huge gamble, they would have no idea who would return, who would not and what stars and potential stars would say "I don't need this," and go elsewhere).
Senior management at the CBC was out of touch with its workforce. What Robert Rabinovitch and George Smith never bothered to examine and what Richard Stursberg was too new on the scene to really understand was the commitment of the majority of CBC employees to their jobs, to public broadcasting and to quality journalism.
What infuriated the majority of the employees was senior management's condescending attitude toward the work that they have been doing for the past fifteen years since the first Martin deficit busting budget cuts. CBC employees have been flexible, they have adapted, they have innovated, they have come up with new ideas to keep the corporation going.
Despite what the public seems to think, CBC employees also know that over the past fifteen years they have been working harder for less money than other people in the broadcast industry.
None of this mattered to the Senior Management Committee.
The first indication that Rabinovitch had no idea what his employees actually did was his reported irritation at complaints about the compression of the working space so "surplus" could be rented out, no matter how it impacted the actual product that CBC aired.
The second was the continued emphasis on "flexibility," but management's definition of flexibility was nothing more than moving figures from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, not figuring out ways of getting broadcast quality video out of Afghanistan by e-mail.
The other problem is that it is likely that George Smith and other senior managers were working on a non-media, brick and mortar industrial relations strategy. After all employees of Canadian Pacific can't go out and build themselves a railway. Air Canada employees can't go out and in a few weeks start an airline after picking up a couple of 747s and A300s.
Since Smith, Rabinovitch and Stursberg have never actually ever produced anything, they had no idea what their employees could actually do. They likely had no idea of the tradition of the strike newspaper going back more than a century. I doubt if they expected the podcasts, the special broadcasts and the blogs. While those projects are slower than expected getting off the ground and will build slowly, they will be up, running and growing.
The big problem
The big problem, as both my sources tell me and from what I hear from my negotiation-expert relatives is the contract itself. The CBC wanted the two unions to merge to dilute militancy, but with that they also brought the problem of integrating two contracts, the old Guild and CEP contracts plus updating the contract to deal with new conditions.
When Premier Mike Harris decreed the amalgamation of Metro Toronto, it created a huge headache both for the city workers and the school boards. Negotiations to integrate and standardize those contracts went on for years and are still going on as problems are being ironed out.
Although the subcommittees have reached agreements in some areas, the stubborn insistence by the CBC that the Guild concede on the casualization issue has, for weeks, prevented talks on about 40 major areas including money.
That brings us back to the playbook. If the Guild had folded early in the week, then it was expected that there would be concessions on other issues and an agreement in time for Hockey Night in Canada.
There is now no possible way to reach an full contract agreement in time for the debut of Hockey Night In Canada.
Why this weekend is important
The Labour Day weekend is important for two reasons.
Katrina
In the brick and mortar industrial relations model that George Smith is following, a major international catastrophe like Katrina would not be a major factor (unless there was a plant or a rail line in a disaster area).
But for a broadcast and cable network, whose core audience comes to it for news, the third-hand, BBC, recut voiceover coverage is itself a disaster.
This is third or fourth hand but a senior manager has told friends and neighbours, who told me, that NCAN editor-in-chief Tony Burman is livid that his beloved news service that he has worked so hard to build up in the past few years is not on the Katrina front line.
The managers putting together the newscasts for the past three weeks were both tired and depressed by the situation. Then came Katrina. Now three independent sources have told me separately that, with Katrina, that they are becoming exhausted. In normal times, when a disaster like Katrina struck, as occurred on September 11, 2001, CBC News would beef up staff, redeploy reporters and call in all available casuals. Now Katrina has to be handled by a small group of overworked, tired, and often inexperienced managers.
Regional managers are going home for the holiday weekend. They have been living in a cocoon for the past three weeks.
It was reported to me that some of these managers are puzzled at the Guild's "stubborn refusal" to see the reasonableness of the senior management position on casualization.
When they go home, it will be like when MPs leave Ottawa to talk to constituents, or perhaps, even like when a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome is released. They will talk to their families, to their friends and neighbors and perhaps to other CBC employees.
If the managers go home, and see that they could be separated from their families for months to come, and that the Guild position is not unreasonable, then they may return less than thrilled at a continued (what Ouimet called) secondment at gunpoint.
The Kosovo/Katrina factor. A call for a truce.
During the 1999 strike (and that was a strike) by CEP, it became obvious as it went into about the sixth week, that NATO was going to go to war in Kosovo. The people inside the Toronto Broadcast Centre had been putting out newscasts without pictures, although radio was able to do more.
As the military began its moves, the news staff were told that the CBC was also planning to go to cover the war.
Both sides immediately entered serious negotiations and there was a settlement in time for full CBC News and Current Affairs coverage of the war.
A quick settlement is unlikely at this time. The senior managers have been flexing their muscles since 1999, the last three disputes have been lockouts, not strikes.
There appears to be no understanding at the top of the CBC of the role of public broadcasting.
There was likely NO contingency plan for a major disaster like Katrina. (News managers always have contingency plans, but it is clear at this point the Senior Management Committee probably did not even consider something like a Katrina or another major bombing attack)
The famous plan that was waved by Robert Rabinovitch in the 10th Floor Artists' Lounge, mentioned by a couple of bloggers, I am now told by sources, was nothing more than a detailed play list of shows that would be aired months from now. This, to me, is confirmed by what I was told before the lockout by people in the CBC tape library, that each weekend for weeks there were large orders for tapes to be dubbed and sent to a storage facility, to be used in case of a lockout or strike.
One of the columnists said that when Canadians start seeing the Beachcombers, they will know the CBC is in trouble.
We're in trouble.
There has to be an interim truce.
Management has to drop the precondition of total surrender on the casualization issue, start talking, end the lockout, get CBC back on the air and get reporters and crews on planes into the southern United States.
There cannot be negotiated settlement in time for Hockey Night in Canada, even if both sides are in agreement on a lot of issues and locked in the Royal York 24 hours a day, seven days a week until the first week in October. Remember it took Toronto sometimes years to resolve all the issues from amalgamation.
CBC management and the CMG have to find a way to create an interim agreement acceptable to both sides, and as has occurred with agreements on other smaller issues, append that agreement to the current contract. (Extra money would make it all the sweeter) while the major issues are negotiated, perhaps with the help of the new mediator everyone is searching for.
If management continues to stubbornly stick to their bricks and mortar industrial relations strategy, the CBC will slowly bleed to death over coming months.
Reaction on the blogs
From comments posted on CBCunplugged when it linked to this
Anonymous poster
An interesting analysis, but it overstates the difficulties in reaching an agreement. The actual differences between the old CEP and Guild contracts are very small. The majority of articles in the separate collective agreements share identical language - part of a process of moving towards a common base that began with the 1996 amalgamation. So getting a deal doesn't have to be difficult or lengthy...If the managers were smart (!) they'd drop their demand to contract out the majority of work, thereby emasculating the Guild negotiators who'd be forced to make a lot of concessions in the remaining areas once the raison d'etre for the dispute was removed. Of course, a smart managerial team would have done that just before the lock out deadline. We're not dealing with smart...Plenty of time to make hockey happen, assuming that the NHL hasn't already cut a deal with Rogers.
Ouimet takes the opposite view, but agrees with the other post that there are hotheads involved.
Real negotiations have not started yet. What is going on is talking about talking. Or rather, talking about the oft-metioned 40 (or is it 41?) issues in smaller groups so that they can get back together and start negotiations proper. when that happens they talk about what they talked about, and write it into the collective agreement - your "contract"...
And before they can come to a settlement, they have to see eye-to-eye on these issues and be pretty sure that they won't get screwed by the other side after the doors are unlocked.
So now you know what I know. The real question is: How long does it take 40 rooms of 24 hotheads to settle 40 arguments?
My guess is that it will be at least 2 weeks before we get an idea of when a settlement will come.
And by e-mail
What concerns and even scares me is that even if we get back inside next week or the week after, all the fundamental forces and problems that caused this insanity will still be around, i.e. Rabinovitch/Stursberg/Chalmers/Smith... Unless there is quick and clean sweep, I just can't see how the damage can be undone. Not to mention the trust that the infamous "Fred and Krista" memo alone obliterated in one clean swoop.
I dont' want to be too obvious metaphorically but we ourselves are in the midst of a man(ager)-made Katrina.
Reply from Robin
Ouimet notes that managers are worried that if the Canadian Media Guild came back in the doors, it could then pull the plug. A key date, therefore, is September 8, when, by law, the strike mandate given to the Guild in the last vote expires. (Interesting that a strike mandate expires, a lockout decision doesn't. But then that's the difference between democracy and dictatorship)
A truce is a truce. A final contract would have a "no strike or lockout" agreement. So could an interim agreement. It would have to be short to keep the negotiators focused. My suggestion is 120 days. That would bring us to sometime in January, with a possible federal election and the Olympics.
That would give advantages to all sides. If things were going badly, the CMG could hold another strike vote; management would be aware that it was winter and both the Prime Minister and the Opposition would know that so far in history only the CBC has blanketed the country during an election. (Of course if we're still out on this round by the election, Robert Hurst at CTV could just hire everyone he needed by setting up a [heated] tent and table on Front Street. Unfortunately it would likely be an election duration only deal)
Remember Samuel Johnson "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." About 120 days would cool the passions, get Don and Ron back on Coach's Corner, give the Senior Management Committee a chance to contemplate the reality of the 21st century media and the Canadian Media Guild wondering what it would be like to be back pounding the pavement in frigid February.
Technorati tags
writing, journalism, CBC, blog, news, lockout,
CBClockout
5:15 PM posted by Robin Rowland
Permanent Link
