BBC Scotland staff have voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action, but disruption to Christmas broadcasting could still be averted.
The National Union of Journalists said more than 70% of NUJ staff who voted are in favour of strike action, with more than 84% in favour of action short of a strike against controversial proposed cuts to staffing at the corporation north of the Border.
Following the results of the vote by more than 1200 staff in the union at the corporation's Pacific Quay base, Paul Holleran, Scottish organiser of the NUJ, said: "This is a powerful result showing the strength of feeling of the people in there about what is happening with redundancies and the management style.
"We are in the middle of intense negotiations with management over redeploying staff and we are looking for the Scottish management to do the right thing here as they have down in England where staff from the Asian Network have been redeployed."
In London, negotiations have focused on digital radio station Asian Network, which will lose around half of its staff as part of the BBC's cost-saving measures.
About five journalists faced compulsory redundancy that was due to affect them on December 31, but they will be redeployed or see another "satisfactory outcome" reached.
Some of BBC Scotland's most senior journalists are to leave the corporation by April, with around 10 jobs affected in total.
A BBC spokesman said: "We have met all our re-deployment commitments in a timetable agreed with the unions and we are continuing with our con-siderable efforts to avoid compulsory redundancies in other areas of the BBC."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article