12-02-2014

TVP Workers Go on Strike

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    WARSAW: Employees of Polish public broadcaster TVP went on a one-hour warning strike on Friday, 7 February 2014, to protest outsourcing changes at the station.

    The TVP employees’ union Wizja said that over 200 television professionals working for TVP in Warsaw took part in the start of the strike there. TVP''s press office denied the numbers, saying that according to inside monitoring only around 70 people stopped working for an hour. The Polish Press Agency reported that workers of regional TVP units in Lodz, Lublin, Gdańsk, Poznań, Szczecin, Kraków and Rzeszów were also striking in numbers from a couple to a couple dozen in each unit.

    The employees went on a warning strike over TVP’s plan to decrease the number of its workers to below 3,000, from around 3,400 currently employed, replacing some employees via outsourcing or hiring individual companies that film professionals would have to create in order to continue working for TVP. TVP is now holding a tender for a company that would employ between 450 and 550 with four companies applying for the tender. 

    TVP is going through several internal changes, the most notable of which is the creation of two new subject channels: the children's channel TVP ABC, and TVP Rozrywka International for Poles living abroad. The creation of new channels did not result in hiring new employees.

    "This protest is the only way for us to keep full-time jobs. Why isn't the President Juliusz Brown talking to us? Why is he silent? Are we all not needed here and television will be created by officials? If TVP fails to talk to us and start some sort of negotiation we will take the next step," the leader of the Wizja union Barbara Markowska said during the protests.

    TVP responded with a statement that the strike was held illegally, as it is a result of a public dispute dating back to 2009 and the issue of outsourcing was added only in 2013. "Moreover, it is not legal for outsourcing to be the object of a conflict between the employer and the employee," Jacek Rakowiecki, the TVP Press Officer, said.

    The next step for TVP employees is to go into general strike, which is expected to take place during the coming week.