Journalists at the Financial Times are threatening to vote on industrial action if the company won’t withdraw plans to force a specialist group of Chinese journalists at the paper to return to China on half their current salaries or else accept redundancy.
Two of the four Chinese journalists are British citizens, and they already have terms and conditions inferior to other journalists at the Financial Times.
The NUJ chapel at the Financial Times voted unanimously at a capacity meeting to demand that the threat of redundancies be lifted from their Chinese colleagues, who produce a specialist Chinese language website for the newspaper.
The NUJ chapel (office branch) declared: “We condemn the outrageous treatment of journalists on FT Chinese. We demand no redundancies on FT Chinese and that the journalists be placed on the same terms and conditions as the rest of FT editorial. It is unconscionable that the FT is sending FT Chinese journalists into harm's way. We will ballot for industrial action if these demands are not met."
One of the FT Chinese journalists has written to his Financial Times colleagues
12 February 2010