Mersey TV redundancies

Mersey Television management has told 13% of its workforce they are "at risk of redundancy".

New management at Mersey Television, the company that produces Hollyoaks for Channel 4, has told 44 people they are potentially redundant less than a year after telling staff it did not intend to do this.

Mersey TV owners All-3-Media also seeks to make major changes in the working schedule and to the existing workplace agreement recently settled between BECTU and the old management after four years of negotiations.

Indications so far are that all the proposed new terms would be worse than the existing ones, and it seems nothing is offered in return for accepting them.

The announcement to staff was made with spectacularly bad timing only days after an item in the local press outlined a number of exciting new programmes the company would be making in Liverpool, but failing to mention that these would not coincide with exciting new opportunities for its workers.

Common sense would suggest that more programmes should require more workers to make them, not fewer, so it is not clear how the company hopes to live up to its aims.

No satisfactory explanation has been given as to why a company that has evidently been financially viable for 24 years, having pioneered the use of small television cameras to make single-camera drama, and recently survived the effective loss of half its income at the closure of its weekly soap Brookside - with fewer job losses than are being contemplated now - suddenly needs to make such drastic economies.

The proposed changes would include the extinction of an entire engineering department of seven people, with their work being given to other colleagues, and it has not been explained how this can be justified as redundancy.

Another change would be the use of two-camera recording (instead of single-camera) through a computer network into a centralised disk store, in the apparent expectation that this would require less attention to continuity and less engineering involvement.

However, experienced staff who deal with these matters on a practical, daily basis suggest it would actually require more.

National official Paul Atkinson said: "Our members are extremely concerned about the impact of the company's proposals and judging by the strength of feeling from the workforce it is difficult to see how a negotiated settlement can be reached unless the company are prepared to take on board the concerns and counter proposals of our members."

At a well-attended shop meeting on 22 June, members were told by shop stewards that they had refused to accept any changes to terms and conditions in the established workplace agreement.

The company, however, still wishes to make its other changes, including the redundancies.

Representatives from the threatened departments and from BECTU are in discussion with management to see how these matters can be resolved.