CCTV Feels Labor Pains

MAJOR LAYOFFS AT China Central Television over the past three weeks highlight the difficulties China's biggest TV broadcaster -- and an official mouthpiece -- faces trying to function like a normal company in a profit-driven marketplace.

More than 1,800 temporary employees have lost their jobs in the past three weeks, CCTV's head of human resources told a Chinese newspaper last week. CCTV confirmed the remarks but declined to comment further. Employees estimate the cuts amounted to 20% or more of the staff at CCTV.

The sudden drop in manpower has left state-owned CCTV in disarray. A producer of a CCTV news program says she is writing news stories herself after writers for the show were let go. Some news items are being repeated more than usual in different programs. According to another CCTV employee, the directors and editors of one news program are shooting video themselves after most of the camera operators were laid off.

In the newspaper interview, CCTV's human-resources director blamed the layoffs on a change in China's labor law and a government crackdown on 'fake news' reports.

In recent years, CCTV's business as China's sole nationwide broadcaster has boomed. While it doesn't make its financial data public, analysts say advertising revenue has never been higher, as companies such as Procter & Gamble Co. use CCTV's reach to target China's vibrant consumer economy.

CCTV will be the sole Chinese broadcaster of next year's Beijing Olympics. To feed the growth, CCTV hired thousands of writers, camera operators and reporters. But when it comes to the size of its official head count, CCTV remains beholden to the government. So it had to do its hiring outside regular channels, employees say.

Last month, China announced pending changes to its labor law aimed at encouraging all employers to put staff on regular contracts, giving them added job security and benefits. Many Chinese companies already do this, but the new law gives the government more traction to enforce the policy.

Employers that don't follow suit could face penalties. Instead of regularizing all its temporary workers, a likely problem given its official head-count quota, CCTV terminated them.

The layoffs, however, also come during an embarrassing time for CCTV, and for China.

On a popular news program last month, the broadcaster aired a report claiming to have found food vendors in Beijing who filled their steamed buns with cardboard.

The report followed several high-profile incidents involving tainted food from China that was shipped overseas. Later, government prosecutors charged a journalist who worked on the bun story, who government officials say was a temporary employee, with fabricating it.

The Beijing station that created the report later apologized. A Beijing court sentenced the reporter to a year in jail and a fine of 1,000 yuan, or about $130, for 'damaging the reputation of a commercial sector,' according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. In the newspaper interview, the CCTV executive said that following the incident, higher levels of government asked the broadcaster to 'rectify' its news division, which makes many of CCTV's popular shows. The executive added, though, that the layoffs were already under way by that point.

'There's no question' CCTV's staff cuts are 'motivated partly, even primarily, by the cardboard-bun hoax and other damaging stories,' says David Bandurski, a research associate with Hong Kong University's China Media Project.

Nicolas Wu, who was fired from a job working on a CCTV news program, says he was given less than a month's notice about the layoffs on July 27. He cited 'pressure posed by the new labor-contract law,' but added that 'the dumplings case could be an excuse, or even have accelerated the layoffs process.'

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Juliet Ye