NUJ to ballot BBC members over strike action

BBC NUJ journalists are being balloted to take industrial action over compulsory job cuts at the Asian Network by December 31 and at BBC Scotland, BBC News and the World Service next year.

Sue Harris, NUJ national broadcasting oragniser, said: “NUJ members at the BBC are facing an unprecedented threat to their jobs as a result of the BBC management’s licence fee deal of autumn of 2010 and the resulting DQF initiative.

“BBC management chose not to fight this settlement, which froze the licence fee and burdened the BBC with an extra £340million spending commitments. As a direct result the BBC Asian Network is suffering the biggest cut of any single part of the BBC. Its budget has been cut virtually by half resulting in around half of its staff being without a job after 31st December 2012. The NUJ never agreed to these cuts.

“Since these cuts were announced at the beginning of this year, the NUJ has worked tirelessly to redeploy its affected members to other parts of the corporation. We will continue at local and national level to do everything we can to resolve the outstanding cases but we believe that ultimately if we cannot do this, NUJ members will need to stand up for the principle of no compulsory redundancies at the BBC.”

The BBC is planning a 20 per cent cut to its budget which could result in the loss of 2,000 jobs.