This is taken from The Guardian:

BBC impasse reignites strike threat

by Dominic Timms
Wednesday June 1, 2005

MediaGuardian.co.uk
Further strike action at the BBC looked inevitable today after senior sources indicated renewed union demands for the director general, Mark Thompson, to "go that bit further" were likely to fall on deaf ears.

As unions behind last week's 24-hour strike said it was "now up to the BBC" to resolve the deadlock over plans to axe 4,000 jobs, sources within the BBC said the corporation had "given as much as it could" during last week's talks at the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service.

A letter from the three unions demanding another meeting with Mr Thompson to discuss the "scale and impact" of the job cuts is expected to arrive at the BBC imminently.

While the BBC is publicly saying it will not comment until it has seen the letter, privately sources said that while nobody has the stomach for another strike, there was little room for the corporation to manoeuvre.

Union officials said this morning that they were "optimistic" the dispute could be resolved, but that if the BBC rejected its demands, strike action could begin as early as next Thursday, the date planned for a third stoppage before the ACAS talks.

A strike on that date could hit the BBC's coverage of the Stella Artois tennis championships and the landmark live natural history series, Springwatch, with Bill Oddie, which debuted on Monday with 3.5 million viewers.

Industrial action would be also likely to hit the BBC's flagship news programmes - Radio 4's Today, Newsnight and BBC1's Six and 10 O'Clock News, well as TV and radio news broadcasts.

The Bectu supervisory official, Luke Crawley, said it was now "up to the BBC" to resolve the dispute.

"It's up to the BBC. We don't think that the current offer addresses our concerns over compulsory redundancies and we are calling on the BBC to negotiate further," Mr Crawley said this morning.

"Having vehemently refused to come to ACAS, the BBC sat down last week and negotiated a result. We want the BBC to go that bit further and agree to negotiate further so that this dispute can be resolved."

After 20 hours of talks at ACAS last week, the BBC offered a peace deal that included a moratorium on compulsory redundancies, promises to postpone the sale of BBC Resources for two years and a June 10 deadline to inform staff at BBC Broadcast whether their pension and other rights would be protected after it is sold.

But after considering the offer for five hours yesterday, unions said they were still concerned at the job cuts and the effect they would have on programme quality.

Instead, they want a further round of negotiations to discuss job cuts in each division of the BBC, with the right to take further industrial action if those talks breakdown.

"The BBC's offer that there would be no compulsory redundancies until July 2006, does not adequately address union concerns," Amicus, Bectu and the NUJ said in joint statement.

"The joint unions call for a further meeting with director general Mark Thompson as soon as possible on job cuts and their impact, both on output, and staff.

"In the event of a failure to reach agreement on the scale and impact of job cuts at divisional level negotiations, a further national level meeting would be held.

"Failure to agree at this stage would result in the resumption of industrial action."