This weekend, it may be a good idea to become a couch potato and have your fill of your favourite soaps because come Monday, they’re going to go off the air.
Producers, workers stick to strike plan
MUMBAI: This weekend, it may be a good idea to become a couch potato and have your fill of your favourite soaps because come Monday, they’re going to go off the air.
In the biggest crisis facing the TV industry, both the workers’ federation and producers have decided to go on a strike.
While the workers have decided to stop work till their demand for shift-wise payments is met, the producers, left with little option, have decided to suspend shooting.
With little or no content bank, private TV channels will be hard-pressed to keep viewers glued to TV sets. Though most are planning re-runs of old programmes, the National General Entertainment channels, a cluster of about 350 national and regional channels, announced a blackout of fresh episodes of all entertainment and infotainment programmes from Sunday night.
For the past two days, DNA has reported how the stalemate between producers and workers threatened to snowball into a larger crisis, affecting viewers.
The problem has its roots in the workers’ demand to be paid by the shift instead of the current practice of monthly payments. This amounts to a nearly 300% hike, naturally escalating production costs. Producers tried to solve the crisis by seeking more funds from channels, but they were turned down.
While producers say they cannot afford to shoot at such low profit margins, channel honchos say increased production costs in the midst of the current economic slowdown is something they cannot absorb.
“There is no way out. We will have to re-package old content and air it. We have already made our stand clear to the producers that we cannot afford to pay them more. They must understand the crisis we are staring at during this recessionary phase,” said Tarun Mehra, COO of ZEE network.
Seconding Mehra is Albert Almeida, executive vice-president of Sony Entertainment Television. “From Monday onwards, we will only air repeat shows as we don’t have any fresh content. Repeat shows will have huge negative impact on our viewership and advertisement revenues. We hope this deadlock is resolved soon. At the same time, we cannot give in to the illogical terms and conditions of the producers’ bodies,” he said.
A Star spokesperson too said they would start telecasting old shows from next week. “We are experimenting with recaps, omnibus episodes, story so far etc. We are also planning to put repeats of some of our weekend shows on weekdays,” he said.
The impasse between the workers and the producers has been going on from the first week of October. The situation was defused after producers agreed to pay hikes. But that never happened.
“A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed three years back with the producers. But after the agreement ended, the wages have not revised. We have signed another MoU, but the payment agreed upon was never implemented. The producers say the channels have not given them the budget to pay our dues, but it’s their fault. They did not take into account our new wages while signing contracts with the channels,” said Dharmesh Tiwari, president of Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), an umbrella body of 22 unions and 1.5 lakh members.
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