Media service support and asset management fund MTVA, established earlier in 2011 to manage the public media, has announced to lay off some 500 media workers already in August and a total of 1,000 in 2011. Currently the public media employ about 3,300. The reaction of Balasz Nagy Navarro, president of the public media trade unions’ council, was that “Public media have never been fully independent in Hungary, but now they are not independent in a very blunt and primitive way”. Nagy Navarro pointed out that some 40% of those to be dismissed are over 50 years of age, with hardly any chances of finding new jobs.
English: Máté Komiljovics, union correspondent
This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Maarten van Klaveren, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2011.