Page 110 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Commun cat on and Knowledge Labor |

ConVergenCe Bites BaCk
On August 15, 2005, Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, locked out all of its employees
in a labor dispute. The company decided to contract out much of its work to temporary,
part-time, and freelance employees in order to save on labor costs as well as to hire and lay
off workers as it wished. The union representing permanent employees refused to sign a
new agreement with these provisions and the battle was on.
CBC management expected victory because it had succeeded in convincing the Cana-
dian government that all of its employees, once members of numerous unions, should be
brought together in one bargaining unit. It expected that members of a union containing
newsreaders, writers, camera operators, and skilled and semi-skilled technical personnel
would not get along and would certainly not hold out together in a long labor dispute. The
company was wrong.
In one of the first successful labor actions of its kind, a diverse group of knowledge
workers held out together for seven weeks and used their communication skills to rally the
CBC audience to its side. Most notably, they organized a national caravan dubbed CBC
Unlocked, and broadcast “lockout” versions of favorite programs on community stations
across the country. When the company succeeded in securing one bargaining unit, work-
ers chose to join the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the leading example of a
converged union. Canadian nationalists were upset, but the CWA used its large member-
ship base to provide $7 million in strike benefits and drew on its international networks to
organize pickets at Canadian embassies around the world.
The company eventually gave in to the pressure of its workers, its audience, and the
Canadian government, and settled for far less than it wanted, thereby demonstrating the
power of a converged union and of knowledge workers to unite and use their communica-
tion skills effectively.

manufacturing as well as in agricultural work. But the difference today is that an
increasing amount of work is taken up with the production and distribution of
information, communication, and knowledge. Furthermore, there is agreement
that a dynamic process of de-skilling, up-skilling, and re-skilling is taking place
in the occupational hierarchy. At different times and in different sectors one or
another of these processes predominates, but the labor process, most concur,
cannot be reduced to the singularity of one process. Nevertheless, there is also
agreement that companies have benefited from reducing the skill component of
jobs or eliminating jobs entirely and replacing them with automated systems,
and this especially applies to jobs traditionally filled by women.

ouTsourCing knowLEDgE LaBor
Where de-skilling or job elimination is not possible, companies have accom-
plished the same objective by moving jobs to low-wage areas within a country
or by shipping them abroad. Since knowledge work typically does not require
moving material things over long distances (e.g., call centers and software