The board of Mediaworks says it's disappointed the morning hosts on air at Today FM a week ago went rogue, savaging the company ahead of an unexpected staff cull at the radio station.
A planned staff meeting was set for midday on March 30, with chief executive of Mediaworks Wendy Palmer set to break the news the board was proposing to axe the station.
But that meeting was brought forward after hosts Duncan Garner and Tova O'Brien decided to be transparent with its listeners about what had been unfolding in previous days and weeks.
They broke away from scheduled programming just after 9am, with O'Brien saying "we don't know how much longer we are going to be on air".
Garner brought the entire newsroom into his show alongside O'Brien.
"It sounds like it's over," she said.
"We've been on the air for a year. We were told we had the support of everyone, from the chief executive through to the board, through to the executive.
"And they have f***** us," she said.
"We're all gonna lose our jobs, and the station is gonna go off the air."
"This is betrayal," Garner said. "We're exposed, we don't have a line of defence anymore, the company is bleeding cash."
He described the scene, saying employees were in a bad way, crying and "shell-shocked".
Just after 5pm the same day, an announcer on the station's frequency said Today FM was no longer broadcasting, while some services would continue until a new station launched.
The Mediaworks board told 1News in a statement that "clearly emotions were running high on Thursday and some of the Today FM team broke the news on air ahead of the planned announcement and meetings with the team".
"This unfortunately meant the process was playing out in the media before staff had been told and had the chance to digest the news. This was disappointing and certainly not what was planned."
'Grounds to take some form of disciplinary action'
Employment lawyer and senior associate at law firm Duncan Cotterill Jeremy Ansell said the on-air comments could have come from the fact Garner and O'Brien were in shock.
"You heard some of the hosts making quite negative and potentially disparaging remarks about their employer on air, in an incredibly public setting.
"I think we can all understand that the decision would have come as a shock and there would have been emotions flying around — but it does seem like they have made highly critical comments about the employer Mediaworks in a public setting and the employer may have grounds to take some form of disciplinary action there in relation to those comments."
Ansell said it could lead to an "interesting argument" in court given the shock factor involved for employees.
"The employees could certainly say that 'we were blindsided by this decision, and the way it came out — we were in shock, we were upset, we weren't thinking straight and this is why we made those comments'. Then it would be up to whoever was determining that case to decide whether the employees did in fact breach their obligations to the employer."
Ansell said the situation was an "extraordinary" one, with staff effectively given less than a day to digest the proposal from the company.
"It's very, very quick in terms of the normal consultation timeframe that you’d expect from an employer engaging in a redundancy process like this," Ansell said.
He said if the correct process wasn't in place and "you don't engage in genuine and sufficient consultation with your employees, the whole termination can be undone and it can be found to be unjustifiable by the Employment Relations Authority or the court".
Palmer said last week the company was being hit by lower revenue and higher costs.
"At the request of the MediaWorks Board we have undertaken a review of the entire business to identify further areas of potential cost saving and to reshape the business for the market conditions.
"This has led the Board to take the difficult decision to take Today FM off air and to explore options for a digital content offering. This is a hard day for this talented team who put everything into building a new talk platform in Aotearoa. They've worked tremendously hard and we're incredibly proud of the work they have done.
"We'll be working with the team to identify other opportunities within MediaWorks where possible and to support them in their next steps."
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