I’ve worked as a technician at the World Service for several years and before that – unusually for a BBC employee – I spent a long time in the commercial sector. The job specification is fairly wide, covering work on recordings, live transmissions and everything to do with audio and video; these days we run a lot of video on our website.I suppose the main reason I took the job was to boost my CV and take advantage of BBC training. The corporation has a fantastic reputation, and it’s an ethical organisation to work for – as opposed to Rupert Murdoch, for example – but lots of things about it really frustrate me.The World Service broadcasts in English and 32 different foreign languages, with the quantity of programmes in any given language determined by the priority status it is given. So, for example, Arabic and Persian are both category one languages; their programmes get more studio time and funding. In the past few years, the World Service has cut the number of languages in which it broadcasts, particularly in the case of central European countries that have recently joined the EU such as Romania and Slovakia. But I think the Service should think about broadcasting in more languages, not fewer. One example I’d give would be Korean: we don’t broadcast in it, yet North Korea is definitely a place where the population needs access to honest, impartial news.
One sad event was the Russian service stopping all of its features output at the start of this year. There was to be no more money for features in Russian – but that’s what the World Service is really good at: analysing news. Yes, we can provide news bulletins, but it’s the analysis – finding out what’s beneath the news – that we do better than anyone else.
Several BBC and World Service bosses have come and gone since I started, and they all want to make their mark, which can often confuse priorities. When I started, the trend was to close overseas bureaux and move more staff back to London, but then a different boss changed course and began cutting people in London and expanding overseas bureaux. It makes you wonder whether bosses learn anything from the organisation’s history and what has and hasn’t worked in the past. We’re all moving up to Broadcasting House, for example, to join the new global news hub – but foreign language services are being stranded on a different floor from the rest, which surely undermines the idea.
There’s been a trend towards cutting staff numbers. A while ago, there was a drive to cut 20 per cent of jobs across the corporation and for about two years staff at the World Service worked under the awful pressure of not knowing whether they would keep their jobs. That makes people very nervous and they behave differently: there’s a lot of backstabbing and it just doesn’t create a positive working environment. At the minute, we are having to deliver three per cent annual efficiency savings, but one thing I notice is that while language services and operational staff may be cut, we always seem to end up with more ambitious, pole-climbing middle managers.
We are obviously funded by the foreign office and have a remit to deliver impartial news and information based on British values of freedom and multiculturalism, but we are affected by what happens to the BBC as a whole. When the corporation lost Greg Dyke as director-general over the David Kelly/Andrew Gilligan affair, it affected us too. He was fantastic for the BBC. He brought the staff together and believed in positivity even though there were cuts that had to be made.
The bulk of the staff in the foreign language division come from the countries we broadcast to, and don’t always know much about UK working rights and union representation. We have a lot of protection here in comparison to Afghanistan or Pakistan, but some people come over not knowing that, and they don’t want to kick up a fuss over conditions – especially when there’s a constant fear of job cuts.
Working conditions are a big concern generally. We all do a lot of shift work, but it was only two years ago that World Service managers realised that by law staff must have at least 11 hours between shifts. Many staff are still forced to switch between day and night shifts, sometimes without any break to adjust: people have to do several days followed by a couple of nights, for example. It plays havoc with your body clock, and it’s not healthy – the Health and Safety Executive say that people should be allocated shifts in bigger blocks of days or nights.
I love the fact that I work for an honest, impartial organisation, and I feel really good about where I work. But the World Service is meant to be about articulating British values, and there’s a tension there with the working conditions. When some staff are leaving work at six in the evening, only to come back in at five the next morning, how are they supposed to have the energy and enthusiasm to make really good programmes?