News IT action ballot
News IT members are to be balloted on industrial action in response to plans to transfer staff out of the area.The follows proposals to transfer a quarter of News IT staff to the planned new owners of BBC Technology.
The union is opposed to the transfer and the consequential break-up of the News Support section.
At a follow-up to the previous meeting with management they identified the pools of staff from which they intend to select staff to transfer to the new company:
- News Support Desk
- Ex-IT staff in Second Line Support
- Network and Server team
At the meeting held on 22 June 2004 management said the decision to include News in the Technology privatisation had originated from Technology Direction, not from within News itself.
Management said they still intended to seek volunteers to transfer.
They claimed that about 25% of desktop PCs in News were non-broadcast critical, and this had lead to the proposals covering the Support Desk and Second Line Support.
They provided more details of how they intend to select Support Desk and Second Line Support staff through the use of the local logging system. They said they would examine logs from June 2003 to April 2004 to clarify who was involved in non-broadcast critical support.
They also intend look at the comments field from the last fifty logs of individuals.
The union critisised this proposal by saying that all jobs may not be logged, and that there is an inherent random element in who carries out fixes, and said it could not agree to this selection process.
The union also said it opposed the break-up of IT/engineering converged areas in News - a concept originally proposed by management.