MBC employees plans to stage a strike

MBC established under a Parliamentary Act was previously operating as radio 1 and radio 2 before merging with Malawi Television in July last year and adopted the name MBC for both services.

Over 50 members of the Electronic Media Workers' Union met last Friday, 19 August 2011, at the institution's headquarters in Blantyre where they unanimously agreed to start an industrial strike.

Currently MBC, a state controlled television and radio broadcaster, has a work force of over 700 employees after the merger and government is currently working towards trimming the work force further to 413, a move that has brought uncertainty to the workers. Only top management has been confirmed while junior workers are still living in the dark.

The meeting last week, chaired by the union's General Secretary Marie Kambeja, agreed to start a sit-in unless management answers to their complaints in time.

Angry workers

"Workers are infuriated with management's claims that we still have to wait because the merger process is still ongoing and that our salaries will wait for this process and yet top managers are receiving salaries reflecting completion of the merger," said Kambeja.

She said the authority's initial excuse was that there were such salary disparities after the merger because the television and radio sections were drawing salaries from different accounts.

"What is confusing now is that, we now have one account and yet there is nothing being done to harmonise the salaries," she said.

But in an interview with The Sunday Times MBC Transitional Committee, chairperson Chimwemwe Banda is quoted as saying that government had already approved harmonisation and MBC was only waiting for the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) to finalise the whole merger process.

"...They [OPC] told us that they will only need 413 employees to remain at MBC after the merger," she said adding that they are currently meeting OPC discussing the matter further.

Banda who is also MBC Director of Current Affairs and Programmes said OPC has asked for a week to finalise the process and they hoped that by 29 August 2011 the changes would have been effected.

The MBC and Malawi Television merge

MBC officially rebranded to combine its television and radio services in March this year.

In July last year, MBC which was previously operating as radio 1 and radio 2 merged with Malawi Television and adopted the name MBVTV and MBC Radio 1 and MBC Radio 2. But with the rebranding, Banda said the acronym MBC will only refer to the television services while the radio services rebranded to Radio one and Radio 2FM.

At that time Banda had told a local weekly that they decided to rebrand because they find it unrealistic to call TV services MBC TV when people already know they are watching television.

"Time is ripe for MBC to emulate some of the advanced media houses around the world," said Banda who added that BBC does not refer to its TV station as BBC TV but simply BBC.

"The same applies to Aljazeera and SABC; they do not use TV at the end of their acronyms in order to differentiate radio from TV service," she said.

From that time workers from the radio service have however, been looking at the rebranding as efforts to kill the spirit that has seen the radio grow to where it is for close to five decades now.

While the radio has been around for 47 years the television services have been in existence since 1995 and workers from the radio section feel that the merger is going in favour of the television section where more programmes and personnel that used to run on the radios have now been shifted to the television section.