They shall be heard!

Big news in Canada during the past few weeks has been a major labour dispute at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) which has seen programming disrupted as CBC has locked out many of the journalists and presenters from the workplace.

So what's this about? Not much on the CBC website to clearly explain it. As good a description as any I've found with a simple Google News search is the "No winners in the CBC lockout" article on the andPop website.

What's very interesting is how both sides have embraced online communication to pitch their different points of view in a dispute where the positions of both sides currently look to be entrenched and inflexible. The CBC has a website called CBC Negotiations in which the broadcaster's management set out in considerable detail their points of view, such as this:

[...] In the flood of communication from both union and management over the last weeks, you will have gathered that there seem to be two central issues at the core of the dispute: contract employment status, and the concept of demonstrated occupational qualifications as the criterion for redeployment during workforce adjustment.

While I'm not making any opinion about the dispute itself, that last bit is fuzzy corporate-speak if ever I read it!

And what about the locked-out employees? Blogs and websites galore as grassroots efforts to communicate about and comment on the dispute from the employee viewpoint.

It gets even more interesting - many of the radio programme producers have started podcasting versions of their shows. CBC Unplugged has an RSS feed for all podcasts (plus iTunes subscription link) as well as a growing blogroll of CBC employee blogs, and says this about what's happening:

Missing your favourite CBC Radio show? Now, re-connect with their favourite personalities and shows. Some producers are making unofficial replacement shows and you can listen to them here. This site is neither affiliated nor endorsed by either the CBC or the CMG. Look, we all love our jobs and want to be back at our jobs soon and put the programming you love back on the radio. In the meantime, I hope this helps.

Some of the podcasts aren't just programming but comment and opinion about the dispute from the presenters' viewpoints.

The future of labour relations? If you're in the broadcasting business at least, this is not the future at all.

[UPDATE] In today's edition of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcast, we include an interview with a CBC reporter on the 'picket line' in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The interview was conducted this morning Halifax time by FIR listener Howard Harawitz. Shel blogged it.