Betevé, Barcelona’s municipal television, is in crisis. Its 25th anniversary in 2019 coincided with its moment of greatest recognition, the exhaustive, rigorous and award-winning coverage of the altercations of the procés. But the delicate economic situation in which the channel now finds itself has not only unleashed a conflict with the staff, which has already seen nine workers fired in summer, but also sows doubts about the viability of the model.
The turning point in the municipal chain was experienced on 23 July. The management met with the works council and workers and announced nine layoffs. But not only that, the director Sergi Vicente, who announced that it was reduced at that time the salary by 5%, also spoke of a “shock plan” that would have to undertake yes or yes to keep afloat the project. “Then we were already hinted that there would be wage cuts, but did not specify,” say from the works council, which responded to the return of summer with a four-day strike during the Festival of La Mercè.
The positions between management and staff are now far apart. According to the works council, in the last meeting they were proposed a salary reduction that for an important part of the workers would exceed 10% and in some cases would reach 20%. Managers would also be lowered, up to a maximum of 13%. The management, for its part, refuses to go into details as the talks are still open, although they assure that the adjustment would depend on the categories and that there are professionals whose salaries would not be touched.
In the origin of the current critical situation of Betevé, a television that depends on the City Council of Barcelona and that today employs 238 workers, there are several factors. One of them is the non-deductible VAT expense, which affects other regional channels. Another key element has to do with the conquest by the workers of their direct hiring and wage equalization, after a long judicial process with numerous rulings that ended with a model of outsourcing the service with production companies in the sector.
After the judges ruled that the news and television workers had won the right to be hired directly and to have their salaries equalized.While Betevé’s technicians were to be hired directly – until then their management was put out to tender and on the last two occasions Lavinia had won – Barcelona City Council approved in 2017, during Ada Colau’s first term of office, the internalisation of the entire workforce. The salary increases resulting from this process were substantial, due to the difference in salaries in the audiovisual sector compared to the public administration. In some cases they were 39%. This caused the weight of personnel costs to skyrocket. It went from 56% of the budget in 2019 to 74% in 2021, which leaves very little accounting margin to allocate it to hiring programmes.
Currently, the highest salary of Betevé is that of the director, around 100,000 euros per year, while that of the editors, who are the majority of the staff, is now – by court ruling – at 38,000 euros.
The City Council will no longer increase the item
“No company, public or private, that spends three quarters of its budget on salaries is sustainable,” says Vicente. The director, who described the situation of the TV as “critical”, says that the council has provided more than 30 million euros extra to the channel in recent years. Sources in the area of Economy, Resources and Economic Promotion of the City Council, now in the hands of the PSC, point out that it has gone from a contribution of 14.5 million in 2014 to 17.6 in 2021. This last figure is the one that will be maintained for 2022, so that from the consistory give to understand that they do not see viable to continue increasing the item.
“After the effort of recent years, is not that close the tap, is that they can not open it more,” argues Vicente on the position of the consistory. In his favor plays that so far none of the municipal groups, with representation on the Board of Directors of the chain, has aligned itself with the labor demands of workers.
Meanwhile, however, the staff sees with indignation how after more than five years of struggle in the courts, and that was put an end to an illegal transfer of workers, now the result is that they are going to cut part of the salary and other working conditions won. “We do not deny the weight of the wage bill, it would be absurd, but we will not accept that we intend to cut instead of providing the City Council what it touches,” they say from the committee. In their favor the workers have a manifesto with nearly 3,000 signatures of support, among which stand out from the Federation of Neighborhood Associations (FAVB) to the Union of Tenants, through Jordi Cuixart, the philosopher Marina Garcés, deputies of ERC and the CUP or the former councilor of the Comuns Gala Pin.
Where should Betevé be heading?
The open crisis in Betevé also has to do with the model of television that this municipal television should represent, without a doubt the biggest local channel with the biggest budget in Spain – it is closer to that of some regional TVs than to that of other local ones – and which at the same time has levels of good ratings and permeability among the city’s neighbourhood that are difficult to gauge. In other European cities there are also local television stations, although the models are very different.
“We’re talking about the aircraft carrier of local television, but Barcelona has more than a million inhabitants,” sums up Josep Àngel Guimerà, a lecturer in the Department of Audiovisual Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and an expert in the audiovisual sector. “Betevé is in an impasse in which the entire audiovisual sector and local TV stations in particular are at a time of technological change after DTT, which has not been the platform they needed to provide service and seek new ways to reach the audience,” he explains.
In the case of the Barcelona channel, the labour conflict is intertwined with the debate about its model. In a context, moreover, in which its contract program – what would be the roadmap of the company – has expired since 2017. In this sense, Vicente defends that, without touching the overall budget, they must manage to allocate two million euros to “balance the accounts” and to order a type of programs that ensures that they can only be done from outside and that they have not been able to buy for years. This money would come partly from the wage bill.
Vicente defends that the “mission” as a public service of Betevé, and for what there is consensus in the consistory, is not only to offer quality news, something that at this point few argue, but also entertainment content and films to which now can not aspire for lack of economic margin. According to the director, today it would not be possible to bet on a program like ‘Telemonegal’, one of the most recognized in the history of the channel, or to give continuity to the successful ‘Oh my goig!’, finalist recently in the MIPCOM Diversify TV awards, because there is neither money for it nor the necessary profiles within the staff to carry it out. Without this kind of bets, reasons the director, the project can’t be competitive and, consequently, neither sustainable.
This is seen differently by the staff. “We could be doing more programs and we believe that the talent of the house is not taken advantage of. What they want is to return to have the candy of before to give it to the producers”, say from the committee, who blame the direction “bad” decisions such as having left languish Betevé radio – after having stayed the frequency in 2014, just before the arrival of the current director – or the problematic launch of the web.
“The workers have done what they had to do, which is to put an end to a fraud of the law,” Guimerà says of the conflict. I don’t have the answer, but the main question is whether we are using public money in the most efficient way possible to keep the public informed and entertained,” he asks. A debate to which TV3 and other public television stations do not escape, although in their case they do not have such an uncertain future.
*Erratum: in an initial version of the article it was stated that the salary of the editors is 28,000 euros per year, according to the document of the list of jobs published on the website of the television station. However, that information was incorrect because it did not refer to the salary dictated by successive judgments and which is about 38,000 euros per year.
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