by jon » Sat Apr 18, 2015 1:07 pm
I don't know how many of you have seen a copy of "The Birth of Radio in Canada - Signing On" by Bill McNeil and Morris Wolfe, published in 1982, but Max Ferguson's piece of it (over 100 Canadian broadcasters wrote a page or three each for it) is the only place I've ever seen him write about the birth of Unions at the CBC.
He doesn't mention an exact date, but it appears to be the very early 1950s. He was able to continue his popular Rawhide daily radio show, but it was a bit of a transition for him to move from the kind of one man show that most of us who have worked in private radio are used to, to suddenly have a large staff assigned to his show. Max worked well with people, and made the whole thing work, with the sound effects being the greatest challenge.
For those of you who feel that eliminating the Unions at the CBC is the first and most important step to saving the organization, I just don't see how that could happen. There have been some pretty nasty strikes over the last 60 years at the CBC, so I cannot see either the CBC or the Federal government being able to eliminate Unions at the CBC if they cannot even maintain Labour Peace. Not to mention that all levels of government in this country, except small towns, are Union Shops.
Over the last 20 years, it has been a real eye opener for me to see how many successful stations in the U.S. and Canada are "Union Shops" (or were, in the 1960s, when I listened to them). Looking around the Pacific Northwest and private stations in Western Canada, non-Union was the Norm, with DJs all alone in the station for much of the broadcast week. Other than a few talk show hosts, you ran your own board.
Many of the stations we loved listening to at a distance, like WLS and KFRC, were Union Shops with board operators for all their announcers. No one is going to say that those stations sounded worse than their non-union rivals, at least in terms of ratings numbers.
My point is that Unions are part of the CBC, just as Unions are part of all levels of government in this country. I cannot see either of those situations changing. The best managers I ever worked with at the CBC were like Chief Engineers that we all knew and loved: they could make anything work by knowing exactly how things work.