The ABC’s union stoush is a culture clash between insider staff and outsider management

The ABC’s fresh news director Simon Robinson generated press reporter and journalism union head Michael Slezak for a “please discuss” conference previously this month. The topic? A viewpoint piece Slezak had actually penned in The Australian Financial Review on press flexibility, particularly concerning a proposition by ASIC to limit reporters from accessing specific info, like business directors’ individual information.

The ABC is presently thinking about whether to discipline Slezak, who is head of the ABC home committee and federal president of media at the reporters’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). In action, Aunty personnel have actually been pressing back with demonstration conferences and petitions, while management is firmly insisting that absolutely nothing– even termination of Slezak– is off the table, according to the MEAA.

It appears ABC management remains in the “put the union in package” phase of handling director Hugh Marks’ top-down culture shake-up of management and reporters alike. The proposed disciplining of Slezak follows abrupt workers modifications at the executive level and surprise departures from appreciated program-makers. It’s making ABC personnel worried as they question: simply what is their future in the Marks’ ABC?

At heart, it’s a culture clash in between expert personnel and outsider management, in between individuals raised in the varying business and public broadcast imperatives. Operating in ad-driven media teaches you how to develop one huge audience through focused, play-it-safe positioning. Public broadcasters, on the other hand, are direct-to-audience, tempered risk-takers, notifying and challenging wide ranges, spread out throughout numerous various audiences.

Business broadcasting requires less reporters to do their task. Its massness brings in a top-down management design that acts to restrict journalistic autonomy. Public broadcasting requires a management that leans into the self-reliance of its far bigger variety of developers. It’s a tough shift for supervisors to make– and few prosper.

The pettiness of this prospective disciplinary trigger raises worries that there’s something larger going on– something more like private-sector-style union-busting. The timing of management’s intervention is raising eyebrows: simply 6 months back, a strike– which Slezak was the face of — showed personnel’s restored readiness to withstand work abuses. That commercial action ended with a brand-new business contract that, to name a few things, required higher task security for great deals of previously short-lived personnel.

Slezak’s union insists he had standing acknowledgment from ABC management that his union function would include public commentary. Regardless, and regardless of his legal securities as a union agent, the ABC is thinking about disciplining Slezak under the corporation’s”external work “policy, which declares to limit what personnel carry out in their own time. All, obviously, to “safeguard the credibility of the ABC “, according to a representative recently.

Concerns, naturally, are being asked about simply how lawfully enforceable this sort of constraint would be; it’s an effort to limit what individuals do when they’re not at work. And about whether it can– and must– be used to genuine reporters’union company, such as defending access to details.

The ABC currently withstood a self-imposed embarrassment when it attempted to count on the great points of work law to end Antoinette Lattouf’s casual agreementBecause case, the judge explained that those guidelines could not bypass rights to reveal political viewpoints, to name a few “fairness”concepts. Battling Lattouf cost the ABC more than $2.5 millionso you ‘d believe brand-new supervisors would beware.

By itself, Slezak’s disciplining might be marked as a simple stumble by the 58-year-old Robinson, the previous managing editor of Reuters and the very first externally employed news director at the ABC considering that Chris Anderson crossed over from Fairfax in 1993. He was generated to change the 42-year-old Justin Stevens, who invested nearly 20 years at the ABC before he was surprised into leaping in May. According to Sally Neighbour’s in-depth countdown account inThe MonthlyStevens was informed that Robinson had actually currently been employed to change him.