Unions representing ABC staff have lodged urgent legal proceedings with the Fair Work Commission to stop a redundancy process in which 300 staff are pitted against each other to retain their jobs, in what has been dubbed a “hunger games” approach.
Late on Friday ABC management told staff the selection pools process would begin and people would be made redundant as early as the middle of next week.
The journalists – including all Lateline and most 7.30 reporters – have been placed in pools from which they will be measured against a skills matrix and selected for redundancy.
“Managers will be applying the selection criteria and carrying out assessments, to advise those staff in the pools who have been identified as potentially redundant by the middle of next week,” news executive Alan Sunderland told staff in an email on Friday.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have secured a hearing at the commission on Monday morning and will ask the commissioner to halt the process, which they say breaches staff agreements.
The unions alleged the redundancy pools system lacked transparency and fairness and some staff had been pressured to accept redundancies before the process had begun.
Earlier, the ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, was asked by a Senate committee if he could put his plans to cut the ABC on hold until more information about the impact was known. Scott said no because the ABC board had put a lot of thought into it already.
The committee also heard the ABC had targeted its highest paid, most experienced staff in order to make the $254m budget cut required by the Coalition.
“The ABC will be chopping into its staff and into its skill and its experience,” the CPSU’s president, Michael Tull, told the parliamentary hearing on Friday.
“These cuts will have a real impact on the ABC’s capacity, particularly to train new people. The ABC is relentlessly targeting high-paid, more experienced staff. I don’t think it will be possible for us to see [in the future] an ABC that we would recognise now,” he said.
The former 7.30 NSW presenter Quentin Dempster appeared as a private citizen and said he believed Scott was making a “strategic error” in cutting local production and news and current affairs.
Dempster said Scott has not made a compelling case for his strategy and had not engaged with staff about how to make the cuts in a way that would not affect viewers.
The journalist also warned that putting iView behind a paywall was opening the way for the whole of the ABC to become a subscription service that was no longer free to the public.
Dempster told the committee the eight local 7.30 programs that were wound up last week cost a total of $3.5m.
In an email to staff, management said that if they were made redundant before Christmas they did not have to go immediately.
“We will extend the process into January for any staff who do not want to make a decision about opting for redundancy or exploring redeployment,” the email said.
