The Guild and the CBC have?settled a grievance stemming from the CBC’s decision to outsource much of its publicity function to Media Profile in 2005.?The Guild challenged whether the CBC had a valid business case to outsource the work.

“The settlement opens up fresh discussions about bringing at least some of the outsourced publicity work back inside,” says Lise Lareau, national president of the CMG. “We’ve always believed that CBC employees are best placed to do publicity for the public broadcaster.”
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Under terms of the settlement, the CBC will pay the Guild $100,000 to be distributed to?affected employees. In addition, three existing?jobs in communications?will?return?to the Guild’s bargaining unit later this year.? The Guild and CBC?management are also committed to?a series of discussions beginning in April?about other publicity work now being done?independently?in Toronto?for The Hour,?the Steven and Chris Show and others.? The two sides may also discuss how CBC handles future publicity?needs for local news.
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A second part of the?grievance is scheduled to be heard by an arbitrator later this year, relating to communications positions the CBC created in 2005. The CMG believes that the account managers and publicity managers that CBC hired and excluded from the bargaining unit rightly belong in the union.

“What the settlement doesn’t do, unfortunately, is restore the jobs of those talented and devoted people whose lives were interrupted so unexpectedly three years ago,” Lareau adds. “We realized that an arbitrator would not have ordered the affected employees to be reinstated. In the end, we decided it was as important to focus on the future.”

In all 33 jobs were eliminated as a result of the outsourcing, mainly in Toronto, Halifax and Vancouver.
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For more information, contact the Guild (info@cmg.ca) at 416-591-5333 or 1-800-465-4149.