BBC’s Siemens contractors mull strike
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Union demands that IT contractors should receive at least £7.60 an hour, ballots members over industrial action
Media and entertainment trade union Bectu is balloting Siemens employees working under contract at the BBC over possible strike action.
Bectu argues that IT contractors should receive a pay increase in line with that currently on offer to BBC employees. “We are outraged by some of the pay and conditions that the BBC seem to find acceptable for their preferred contractors to provide their employees,” the union wrote in an open letter addressed to the BBC’s human resources director.
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Although Bectu acknowledges that it cannot negotiate the terms of the BBC’s supplier contracts, it believes that there is a “moral obligation on the BBC to ensure that nobody working on a BBC contract [is paid] less than £7.60 an hour.”
It also called for a cap on executive pay, arguing that “no one should earn more than 5 times the mean average salary of a BBC employee”.
Siemens has been the BBC’s strategy technology outsourcing supplier since 2005. Recently, however, the relationship has appeared to be under strain. In December 2009, the BBC took its Digital Media Initiative (DMI) – under which all production and archiving systems are being ‘digitised’ – back in house following project delays.
Last month, the BBC’s chief technology officer John Linwood – whose decision it was to bring DMI in house – spoke to Information Age about its relationship with suppliers. “It is very important that you understand what it is that you are outsourcing, but historically the BBC outsourced even those people [that did], so we ended up outsourcing the entire capability to a third party,” he explained. Click here to read the full interview.
Siemens is the latest IT services supplier to come under pressure from unions. Both Hewlett Packard and Fujistu have received similar complaints in recent months.
