Why precarious work endangers the future of public broadcasting and journalism in Canada
Since Aug. 21, about 70 workers at TVO have been on strike.
Six weeks in, on Sept. 28, the provincial public broadcaster brought the membership what they called their “final offer” – which maintained the existing contract protections in the current collective agreement, but came in lower than the union’s ask for wage increases. The union voted against the deal and are back to the picket lines.
Wage increases and a waiver — a request from the Ministry of Education to drop the collective agreement provision that converts temporary workers to full time after two years of service — were the key sticking points in finding an agreement, which broke down after months of negotiation.
The recent organizing comes after Ontario’s conservative government passed Bill 124 in 2019, a piece of legislation which caps wage increases for public-sector workers at one per cent over three years. After three years of lost compensation, including for workers at TVO, the bill was found unconstitutional by the Ontario Superior Court in 2022. The province is appealing the decision.
Leading up to the contract negotiations, financial reports revealed that TVO had $17 million sitting in investments.
Meanwhile, workers such as those at the publicly funded educational and media outlet have been caught in the crosshairs with stagnant wages and precarious labour. The union is calling for binding arbitration to get its members back to work.
Meredith Martin, president of the TVO chapter of the Canadian Media Guild, joined Mount Royal associate professor and co-director of the Community Podcast Initiative Meg Wilcox to talk about the strike, where the members go from here and what this means for journalism in Canada.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can read or listen here.
Audio was produced in collaboration with the Community Podcast Initiative at Mount Royal University.
Meg Wilcox:
Your TVO employees or colleagues with CMG have been on strike since Aug. 21. And I’m curious, we don’t just end up at a strike right away. What sort of led up to this and what was the decision for the members to go on strike?
Meredith Martin:
We started negotiating with TVO in November of last year. And at first I thought it was going to be a really easy process because there wasn’t that much to talk about in my mind. It was just we really had been stuck under Bill 124 in the last round of negotiations. The government imposed on all public sector employees a wage cap of one per cent a year for three years. And we were tied under that during the last round. So there wasn’t a lot to talk about because we couldn’t negotiate on monetary, which means almost anything. And our wages had been rising below inflation for the 10 years preceding that so we were really looking for wage gains. That was the number 1 thing. And given that the public has really started to understand the idea of inflation in a high inflationary time, because we’re all feeling it in our pocketbooks, I thought it would be a more reasonable ask.
But unfortunately, the employer came back in February and said that they wanted us to also give up rights of future employees. So they wanted us to sign a waiver that would waive away the rights of contract — any new employees on the education side would be considered contract in perpetuity. And that was not something that the union could agree to. And so almost immediately in February, we did a strike vote amongst the membership and they gave us a 100 per cent mandate on a “no” to that. And so we had that strike mandate from February onwards. And TVO did give us some positions at that time. So we’re operating as a publicly run public broadcaster that is owned by the provincial government, so there’s a headcount issue, so basically the province tells the public sector workers, like each department, you can only have so many full-time employees basically.
So for TVO we were told, I think it was something like 305 headcount and so the management kind of came to us and said, “we’re not allowed to exceed this headcount and if a position exists for more than two years, that’s great, but we don’t have the headcount, so we’ll have to start cutting positions from The Agenda or from TVO Kids.” And we said, “that’s not our problem,” Then basically, we did the strike vote and they gave us 15 more positions. So there already had been members who should have been converted to staff and they weren’t doing it. And so we were just trying to get them to abide by the collective agreement. And they managed to get more headcount, but then they kept coming back to this point like, “we can’t get more, we’ve asked, we can’t.”
And the union kept saying, “well, that’s not our problem.” I felt like we were slow rolling towards a strike for months and months and by the time we hit August, we had been without a collective agreement for 10 months at that point and so we voted to go on strike and then we walked off the job. We exercised our right to not work. And it’s not something that anybody did lightly. It is a very hard decision, but we had gotten to a point where we thought we can’t work for an employer who doesn’t abide by the collective agreement that existed, that wanted to have precarious work going forward and that had been paid below inflation for over 10 years. I’ve been there for 22 years. And when I think back about my salary, I make now about 15 per cent less than I did in 2012. I have two kids, I cannot do that forever. I can’t take a wage cut every year.
Meg:
And you’re in Toronto!
Meredith:
Yeah, I’m in a very expensive city. And, and so was the membership and I realized that the youngest members of our group can’t live anywhere near the headquarters and I had been able to be hired at TVO and save money and buy a house and really the only reason I can continue living there is because I can protect that asset and that asset wealth has gone up. But for my new younger members, that’s not an option for them. And I just don’t see that as fair.
Meg:
As you said, the math on the salary — if there’s been no raise for 10 years, Wasn’t there one per cent for three years? that speaks for itself. I’m curious a bit more looking at the element around contract hiring. There was a provision currently in the agreement that if someone is essentially full-time or in a position for two years, they become a permanent employee.
Meredith:
Yes. So, if there’s a new job that TVO wants to do, they approach the union. The union always says, “yes, let’s make more jobs.” But there’s language in the agreement that said if that job exists for two years, then it becomes a permanent position embedded in the organization. And it’s never been a problem for as long as I’ve been there until the last couple of years and then all of a sudden the provincial government imposed this headcount issue. It may have been a headcount issue in other governments. I just didn’t know about it because it wasn’t a problem. Maybe their headcount was more reasonable.
Meg:
If we think about this ability to take a two-year position and turn it into something permanent, how big of a deal is that for employees who are coming in to TVO?
Meredith:
It’s a huge deal because having a precarious work environment means that people can’t point out when things aren’t going right. So they can’t talk back to management in any way. And it’s not like we want people to be able to say no to their bosses or anything like this. People work at TVO because they want to work. Everybody wants to work. But you can’t point out workplace discrimination because you feel like, “well, if I pointed it out I won’t get renewed” or you can’t point out unreasonable or bad behavior. And we’ve seen over the last couple of years at TVO some pretty unreasonable and bad behavior that was left unchecked because people didn’t feel like they could speak up about it. And it was always the newest employees, the contract workers who bore the brunt of that.
Meg:
And so the agreement was to go on strike, as you said, 100 per cent of the vote. We’re now hitting about Week 7 of the strike. How has that been for the membership?
Meredith:
I think it’s been bananas. That’s the only way I can describe it. I think most of us thought that it would be a one-or-two week thing, although you always plan for at least six weeks. So we were organized and we were ready. But the fact that we had to work so hard to get management to come back to the table — each week you kind of execute a bunch of strategies and then they’d come back for a day. But they weren’t serious. And so it wasn’t until last week, I believe, or the week before last week that they came back and really fully bargained. That’s how it felt to the union anyway. And that’s when they dropped the waiver and we were able to present something to the membership that they then voted down. So basically all that’s left at this point are wages. I think the membership is exhausted but resolved. That’s definitely how I feel. We feel like we’re on the right side of history here, that the public understands that taking a wage cut every year for over a decade is not a reasonable ask. And we’ve had all kinds of love and support from the public, and the labour movement has been incredibly supportive. So that is very, very helpful.
Meg:
I know that the union has crunched some numbers in terms of what this strike is costing in the broader picture, to have people off work, to not have original content going on at TVO. And so I’m wondering by your calculation, what are the losses here by this six, seven weeks off the job?
Meredith:
We calculated that the employees at TVO who are not CMG members have earned about $3.5 million over the last six weeks and they’re not doing full-time work because there’s no new content that’s being created. So they don’t have any new content to create or to work with. That doesn’t mean that they’re not doing anything. I know that I’m sure they’re doing (things like) LinkedIn learning and some training. I’m sure that there are some departments that can function without new content, but I know that TVO sent everybody home as soon as we went on strike because they didn’t want people to have to cross a picket line. And a bunch of people cannot do any work if they’re not in the building, so TVO seemed very ready to give up the productivity of 310 members in order to suppress the wages of 74, which I find just wildly bad use of taxpayer money.
Meredith:
And on top of that, the membership now has lost about $750,000 in wages and the wage offer they’ve presented to us is only worth about $400,000. So TVO right now is saving $350,000 on our salaries and they refuse to give it back in future wage increases, which to me again, is bananas. It doesn’t make economic sense. And so it seems pretty clear that they don’t care about the money and we also know that when you have 74 unemployed journalists and educators, we went looking around in their books and we found $17 million that they had just put in a GIC in 2022. So that’s now locked away for five years and that could have easily been used to prevent this strike and pay their employees. So again, bananas to me that were in this situation to begin with. We never needed to go on strike. It’s as far as I can tell, we’re stuck between ego and narcissism. That’s my take.
Meg:
Have there been any discussions around TVO or reports around working with smaller budgets or needing to make cuts in those areas?
Meredith:
The notion at the beginning was that TVO just didn’t have enough money. When we found the $17 million, it became clear that that wasn’t the case. But TVO has had provincial governments, not just the Progressive Conservatives, but the Liberals before, had been cutting TVO’s budget every year for years during the pandemic. We started doing more work on the education side and they did a bunch of hiring and then the way that the Ministry of Education dealt with our budget was to very much cordon off the money they give to the education side from the production side. So the production side has been losing ground for years and just over the last few years, the education side seems to have plenty of budget. But again, this isn’t my or the union’s problem. These are barriers that the government is creating for the organization and it’s up to management to navigate that or to fundraise the difference. Look at PBS, look at NPR. There are a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit that they could be doing to ask for money on our YouTube page and on the content that we create. So definitely there are fiscal constraints, but none of them are so difficult that they can’t be managed.
Meg:
Around 70 employees within the CMG at TVO, but out of the 400 employees, the vast majority are members of Unifor, is my understanding. As CMG members have been on strike, what has the relationship been there? Has there been support from Unifor? How is that playing out?
Meredith:
The Unifor employees at TVO, you’re right, there are about 210 of them compared to our 74. It’s kind of a weird dynamic within the workplace that we aren’t all under one union. It would be much easier and we would have more leverage if we were all under one union. But generally we have a pretty good working relationship with that union. The parent union has donated generously to our strike fund and that’s been awesome. And then other Unifor members have come out and visited us at the picket line, but their contract negotiations start up pretty soon. And I think part of the reason why we’re still on strike is because TVO is afraid of us getting too high a monetary increase and having that impact on what Unifor asks for, and then they have more bargaining power because there are more of them. So I think that’s potentially why we’re still on strike. I don’t think that’s fair because our contract ended last November and I don’t believe theirs ends until this December. And so this should have been something that management handled much faster on our end instead of letting the two negotiations bleed into one another. They were so slow to react to any non-monetary ask that we ended up on strike. So all of this could have been avoided by better management in my mind.
The public has been very supportive and generous and we have been raising funds so people feel like they’ve got a safety net behind them, that the union has their backs. We also get strike pay obviously. We’re part of the Communication Workers of America, and so that’s who pays our strike pay and it’s about $500 every week, so it’s about equivalent to unemployment and then people are picking up other jobs and stuff like that. So we can make this work for a while longer, that’s for sure.
Meg:
And what are the next steps? What are your hopes now that, you know, you’ve gone back to the employer and not accepted the deal, but what are you hoping happens next?
Meredith:
I’m really hoping that the government intervenes at this point. It’s clear that we’re at loggerheads with management, and the chairman of the board is a political appointee. The CEO is a political appointee, really. We understand at this point that the government is in charge and that they should be stepping in and offering binding arbitration. The union has said from the beginning that we would’ve taken binding arbitration. We’re only 74 members. It’s ridiculous. We should have just had a neutral third party decide on wages, what was fair and what is reasonable, and the union was willing to take the chance that that wouldn’t go in our favor. And we are still willing to take that chance because you never know what an arbitrator is going to think or how they’re going to read the arguments. And so it’s a risk for both sides, but the union has been willing to take that risk because it just seems like the fastest way for us to get back to work. If they agreed to binding arbitration today, we’d be back at work tomorrow and everybody just wants TVO to give us binding arbitration.
Meg:
You’ve already mentioned support from journalists, other unions, other groups. What are you hoping that maybe other journalists, other people in unionized situations take from your experience and, and take from what’s going on right now?
Meredith:
I’m really glad you asked that because as part of the Communication Workers of America, we’re associated, affiliated, supported by journalists in the U.S. as well. So the News Guild, which is under this umbrella organization, unionized environments of The New York Times, The New Yorker, all kinds of papers across the U.S. and I think we’re the 28th strike in North America this year of newsrooms because newsrooms are under siege. Journalism obviously is incredibly precarious right now. The ad-based revenue model is completely broken. It makes absolute sense for governments to support publicly funded news and current affairs because the private sector can’t make money from it anymore. So if you want a healthy, news environment, a healthy journalism environment, you need to support public media. And I would love for Canadian media and news organizations to start waking up to the fact that if we don’t work together, we’re all going to go down together.
It’s not just about TVO. I know this sounds sort of like corny and over the top, but it really is about democracy. You have to have a healthy media environment in a country in order to hold power to account. And I don’t feel like journalists in Canada recognize that in one another. I think there’s way too much kind of internal competition, and I don’t think that’s a healthy attitude. I think everybody should be concerned about the strike at TVO. The more journalism jobs there are out there that are viable, that you could make a living at, the better it is for the whole country. You need to have a healthy media in order to survive as a democracy. And we can even see it in the U.S. — they’re becoming more and more authoritarian. There’s some very extreme views that are gaining ground in the U.S. and it’s important that journalists understand that we have to fight that. And I think unions are a very good way to do that.
Meg Wilcox teaches in Journalism and Digital Media at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada, and is co-director of the school's Community Podcast Initiative. An award-winning podcaster, she has been making podcasts for more than a decade, and loves collaborating with community members, students and organizations to tell audio stories. Before joining MRU, Meg travelled the country as a reporter, producer, and host (CBC, iPolitics, CTV, Banff Centre Radio, CKUA). Her first book, The New Journalist's Guide to Freelancing, is out now through Broadview Press.