Cianan Brennan: RTÉ in need of a good tuning if it is to garner public support

For the broadcaster’s plea for a taxpayer bailout to be taken at face value, it needs to face up to how it managed to misclassify so many staff, writes Cianan Brennan

A key strand of the meeting was Dee Forbes’s performance under questioning as to whether or not RTÉ would back-date entitlements such as pension contributions and maternity benefits missed out on by workers found to be bogus self-employed.

The appearance of RTÉ’s director general before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week displayed the contradictions writ large of the broadcaster’s seemingly never-ending quest for more taxpayers’ cash while at the same time, treating some of its own employees as disposable commodities.

The station’s financial woes are not exactly a secret. It is hard to remember the last time RTÉ wasn’t strapped for cash, or having to undergo cost-cutting measures, or selling off its land, or running voluntary redundancy programmes.

In the lead-up to the much-anticipated PAC hearing — which had been delayed for three months due to director general Dee Forbes’s “very busy schedule” last November, the broadcaster got the narrative it wanted — that it is losing €65m per year as a result of licence fee evasion and so-called ‘no-TV households’.

The licence fee system is “utterly broken”, we were told, and needs to be fundamentally reformed, setting the stage you would imagine for the introduction of some form of household broadcasting charge which, in theory, would do away with much of the losses currently being seen.

Self-inflicted wound

However, the hearing itself paid less attention to RTÉ’s financial plight and focused more upon the entirely self-inflicted wound that is its designation of some (both historic and current) full-time workers as
independent contractors.

Workers without benefits, in other words, the bogus self-employed.

The problem here is that for RTÉ’s earnest plea for a taxpayer-bailout to be taken at face value, it really needs to face up to, in good faith, what has happened in the past in terms of how it managed to misclassify so many employees.

A key strand of the three-hour meeting was Ms Forbes’s performance under questioning as to whether or not RTÉ would back-date the entitlements — such as pension contributions, maternity benefits, holiday pay etc — missed out on by workers found to be bogus self-employed following a review currently being undertaken by the Department of Social Protection.

These payments are not likely to be insignificant. Some 500 employees are having their working situation reappraised. Many of them have worked for the station for years, and not all of them back-room staff either.

Before the meeting, the Irish Examiner asked RTÉ the same question. Its response was a standard kick-for-touch: “RTÉ recognises and respects the statutory process which is under way, and it would be inappropriate to comment further on this process at this time.”

At the hearing, Ms Forbes was asked the question again and gave a response which equated to taking a long time to say a simple thing, to paraphrase: “Not unless we have to”.

“We have to look at all of this in the round,” she said. “What we want is a process that we can view holistically. The spirit in which we went into the process and reviews was one in which we wanted to understand the complexity of what had gone on. In our governing principles (agreed with the Trade Union Group representing employees in 2019) … the matter of retrospection, or anything on that level, would feature at the end of the process.” The position is ‘we’re in this voluntarily and in good faith, give us a chance’.

Review of contractors

It doesn’t really tally with the history of this little saga, however.

First of all, RTÉ only commissioned the initial review of 433 contractors in 2018, carried out by consultants Eversheds Sutherland, after being put under intense pressure by unions, and after being identified as a bogus self-employer on its own airwaves by one of its journalists, Philip Boucher Hayes. That review eventually found 157 workers had “attributes akin to employment” (what a phrase that is), with 82 of them eventually offered full-time contracts.

Second, its correspondence with PAC regarding the evolution of that process has been akin to pulling teeth. When the broadcaster appeared at the
committee last April, its financial controller, Fiona O’Shea, was asked three times whether RTÉ had made a settlement with the Revenue over its misclassification of workers. She said she was “not aware of an indication of a bill”. Then she was asked a fourth time by the committee chair, and suddenly the memory of such a payment did indeed spring to mind. If this sounds like an exaggeration, the video is worth watching back.

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It took almost two months and the committee bouncing back and forth between Revenue and RTÉ before it was established the payment was for €1.2m. That answer was only forthcoming after Revenue made clear to the PAC that it had no objections to the payment being made public.

So the idea that RTÉ is a wide-eyed ingenue in this context doesn’t really wash.

Ms Forbes remarked on six separate occasions last week that the matter involves a “legacy” issue, ie one that predates her. And so it does, though the current veil-of-secrecy approach is entirely on her watch.

The idea that RTÉ would cover the back-payments of PRSI for formerly bogus self-employed workers, as committed to last week, but not their workers’ entitlements doesn’t feel like it holds water either. How would they have a leg to stand on? You can’t have one without the other surely.

But the overriding impression from the committee was that if RTÉ wants sympathy in its search for financial salvation, it could do worse than treating employees who have been wronged over the long-haul with a bit more respect.