Canadian Media Guild

• Toronto, ON, Sept. 28, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After months of negotiations, TVO Media Education Group (TVO) has presented Canadian Media Guild (CMG) with a final offer in the negotiations for a new collective agreement.
• The final offer, delivered to CMG yesterday, consists of three key elements:
  1.
• An agreement to retain the language currently in the collective agreement regarding contract employees, with no waivers allowing for contract extensions.
• TVO has an FAQ available to provide answers to common questions and provide additional information around these negotiations.

• Organized by the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, this annual parade rallied union members, their families, and community members from every corner of the City and wider Region.
• We are standing with you,” said Andria Babbington, President of Toronto & York Region Labour Council.
• Labour Day in Toronto began in 1872, when thousands of workers gathered to protest the arrest of leaders of the Globe Printers’ Strike.
• With this in mind, the Labour Movement was pleased to be joined by Toronto’s Mayor, Olivia Chow, in the first Labour Day Parade of her term as Mayor, along with other progressive elected representatives.

• Workers at TVO are on strike for the first time in the public broadcaster’s 53-year history.
• I spoke to a producer who has worked at TVO’s flagship current affairs show, The Agenda, for 22 years and earns $74,000.

Wages shrinking

• In a video posted to social media, digital journalist Daniel Kitts, who has worked at TVO for 25 years, says: “For the past 10 years we have tried to… support this organization by seeing our wages shrink basically every year thanks to inflation.
• TVO workers say these contracts prevent them from doing the kind of rigorous, civic journalism and current affairs programming that serves communities in Ontario.

The risks of precarious work

• People in precarious employment earn low incomes, face intermittent and insecure work, lack access to benefits and training and endure stress, social isolation and poor mental health.
• Such pressures on individual lives shapes people’s participation in community life, and precarity becomes a burden borne by society at large.
• Striking TVO workers are drawing attention to journalism’s precarity penalty: the consequences for robust journalism when the work of producing journalism is made precarious.

TVO’s contract workers

• As money comes in for specific projects, workers are hired on contract.
• TVO wants the union to give up language that enables workers on contract for two years to become full-time employees, eligible for benefits and other protections.
• As profits decline and labour forces contract, fewer journalists are in secure positions and increasing numbers of workers are on contract or freelance.

The impact on diverse communities

• Journalists, researchers and advocates have long been calling for increased racial and gender diversity in journalism, demanding that newsrooms represent the communities they report on.
• Public, non-profit outlets like TVO can and should become model employers, committed to producing journalism in the public interest and providing workers, particularly those from diverse communities, with the sustainable jobs necessary to do so.
• In this context, TVO workers’ strike for material security to do work in the public interest matters more than ever.

• TORONTO, Aug. 15, 2023 /CNW/ - Canadian Media Guild (CMG) members at TVO will be in a legal strike position as of Friday, August 18, 2023.
• These are public sector jobs that the government is trying to turn into gig work and CMG members at TVO cannot abide it.
• CMG members at TVO have previously negotiated language to allow the employer to trial new positions for two years before making them permanent.
• CMG members at TVO are determined to do what it takes, including job action, to resolve these issues.