This is taken from The Guardian:

Unions ballot BBC staff over strike action

by Stephen Brook
5 pm Monday July 10, 2006

The BBC faces potential strike action after the four broadcasting unions agreed today to ballot members working at the corporation over job cuts, pensions and the annual pay offer.

Members of the four unions - the National Union of Journalists, Bectu, Amicus and the Musicians' Union - will be balloted over industrial action from July 21.

Union officials said their members were angry about large pay rises for senior BBC managers, revealed when the corporation's annual report was published on Friday, at a time of sweeping job cuts.

They are also angry about planned compulsory redundancies, a 2.6% annual pay offer and proposed changes to the BBC pension scheme, which would see staff having to work to 65, instead of 60.

"BBC managers cannot be surprised by the immense anger with which their actions have been met by hard working staff," said the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear.

"Whilst hundreds of journalists were hard at work on one of the busiest news days of the year, BBC managers where celebrating huge pay awards," he added.

"The fact that money can be found to reward managers who have axed jobs, cut programme budgets and presided over a pensions fiasco, but cannot be found to save vital jobs in current affairs show where the current BBC management's priorities lie."

Union officials are writing to the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, to demand a meeting to discuss pay and pensions.

In May last year BBC staff staged a one-day strike over Mr Thompson's redundancy plans, which caused widespread disruption to TV and radio news programmes.

This is taken from the Daily Telegraph:

A STRIKE IS JUST WHAT BBC CHIEFS DESERVE By Tom Leonard
July 13 2006

To borrow the catchphrase of one of its favourite comedians: "Do I look bovvered?" Does the BBC look bothered by criticism any more? I only ask because members of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee grilled corporation chiefs about their annual report this week and I fear they were wasting their breath. Jonathan Ross's agent aside, the corporation's bosses have only one outsider to keep happy nowadays, and the Government seems deliriously pleased with the Beeb.

The corporation very probably won't get the vast licence-fee rise it is seeking, but the major backtracking it has since performed on its sums suggests it was never a serious bid. But in every other way, the BBC has got exactly what it wants from Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary - the licence fee guaranteed for 10 years, during which time pretty much everything else about broadcasting is likely to change fundamentally, and a half-baked new governance system that is unlikely to check its imperial ambitions.

Given this Government's track record in courting media organisations that it hopes will give it sympathetic coverage, is it any surprise that Ms Jowell goes out of her way to keep the BBC sweet? Labour backbenchers
- debating the corporation's Charter review on Monday and competing as to who could outpraise the BBC - seem to believe that we have a simple
choice: a mighty, do-exactlyas-it-wants BBC, or Rupert Murdoch and the forces of darkness will triumph.

A former BBC executive assures me that what comes across as arrogance is actually insecurity, that the corporation is simply in constant terror about its future, but I can't say I'm convinced.

There's a weariness, tinged with exasperation, in the voice of Michael Grade, the BBC chairman, when he is called on to defend the corporation.
Even the most hard-headed private company might think twice about announcing vast pay increases for its senior executives at a time of thousands of redundancies, falling ratings and below-inflation staff pay rises. But the BBC did, and then seemed surprised that people took it badly. Mr Grade, speaking on Today this week, waved away the criticism as the "annual ritual" of outsiders getting "obsessed" with how much the bosses get paid. One can only hope that the producers apologised profusely for getting him out of bed for such a non-story.

Just as the public-service content of BBC programmes is becoming hard to spot sometimes, so the public-service ethic appears to be dwindling in its boardroom. The argument that the corporation has to pay close to market rates for its bosses must ring particularly hollow with MPs, many of whom themselves sacrificed far more lucrative careers to the concept of public service. As for the confident assertion that all these BBC executives would instantly be snapped up by the private sector, I cite the case of Stuart Murphy, a former BBC3 controller and corporation golden boy, who lasted just three months when he moved to an independent production company. Many BBC panjandrums have no experience of working anywhere else but the corporation, and their main attraction to other employers is what they can pass on about how to sell shows back to the BBC.

The BBC's "talent" is more obviously in demand. The corporation's first reaction when details leaked out of the astronomical sums it was paying its most valued presenters was instructive - not, as one might have expected, coyness about the sums, but outrage at the leak and a pledge to catch the leaker. The usual defence that it was simply paying market rates didn't wash with broadcasting insiders, scratching their heads to think who else would pay Mr Ross £530,000 for a weekly radio show, or reportedly more than £1 million a year to Jeremy Paxman for a news programme with fewer than a million viewers. The corporation blames its need to request an annual licence-fee rise of 2.3 per cent on escalating broadcasting costs. Now we know who's escalating them.

Mr Grade will also be getting a large pay rise when the board of governors is replaced by a trust, supposedly ushering in a new era of real accountability. Everyone but the Government and the BBC believes that little has changed - the first four names to be appointed trustees were all reassuringly familiar, being governors already. This year's annual report, supposedly the work of a toughed-up governing board, provided the usual big tick against the BBC's output. When even Davina McCall's dog's dinner of a BBC1 chat show gets signed off by the governors as an "attempt worth making", one has to wonder if there's anything they would consider not worth making.

A much-vaunted governors' review of BBC coverage of Europe found no evidence of systematic bias, but omitted to say it was based on analysing just two weeks of programming. On Tuesday, Mr Grade was asked if his board had ever said "No" to the BBC. After some procrastination, it became clear that it hadn't. Don't laugh, but he promised to hand licence-fee payers a rebate if it's not spent wisely.

As for the BBC's expansionist tendencies, new checks such as "public value tests" and "new service licences" sound impressive, but are less reassuring when the small print reveals that the BBC will still have a major say in what it should and shouldn't be allowed to do. And it wants to do so much. The corporation's commercial arm is now this country's third-biggest consumer magazine publisher - it's even buying into magazines and radio in India. Meanwhile, director-general Mark Thompson talks of making the BBC an internet player as big as Google.

Asked to justify each new eyebrow-raising venture, the BBC's stock response is that it does it because the public wants it to do it. People love, trust and admire us, smiles the BBC. And, of course, generally they do. Still, the corporation might want to ask itself if that deep well of public affection is down to the likes of £18 million-a-year Jonathan Ross and some fabulously paid marketing chief who could go to Coca-Cola tomorrow if he wanted, or to other, less showy contributors. I have a friend who is a BBC minion. He has a mousetrap under his desk, earns barely enough to feed one if he caught one, and works very unpleasant hours. The only time he sees BBC executives is when a new programme is launched and they descend en masse, cracking open the champagne, congratulating each other warmly. I think I know how he will vote in the forthcoming ballot by BBC staff unions on industrial action over pay and conditions.

I am sorry if it disrupts your fix of EastEnders or keeps Paxo off Newsnight for a day or two but, if there is a strike, BBC bosses will finally be getting the sort of performance-related bonus they deserve.