STV members strike action, day two
Journalists at STV began their second day of strike action over pay on Wednesday 1 May.
There was a picket line outside the STV headquarters in Glasgow and a letter was handed out to shareholders as they entered the building for the broadcaster’s annual general meeting. NUJ members also joined the AGM. All news bulletins and the flagship 6’o’clock news programme were expected to be pulled off air.
The letter to the shareholders said the industrial action, the first in 25 years, had not been taken lightly. “We are serious and committed staff who care about the news programmes we produce. We are certainly not militant or unconcerned with the economic challenges faced by commercial broadcasters. This is a newsroom that has accepted pay freezes more than once in recent years when we have recognised economic conditions.”
The letter went on to say that a 6 per cent pay rise is now affordable: “We are asking for a reasonable pay increase which leaves us no worse off after a year of record inflation and cost of living increases last year.”
The letter went on to say the rejection of the pay claim was because the management undervalued their staff. Another sign of this, they said, was that not one single member of the management team attended the leaving event of the company’s longest serving journalist Bernard Ponsonby.
The letter ended saying: “Without the success of STV News and the journalism it produces – Scotland Tonight, What’s Scotland, and the online news – STV would simply be a production house in Scotland. We deserve to be treated with more respect and for the management to settle this dispute with a fair pay offer.”