13 AUGUST 1983, Page 19

The press

The FT fiasco

Paul Johnson

The Financial Times management may huff and puff but it is perfectly obvious that they have lost the battle with their machine-minders and the NGA; have, in- deed, been humiliated. The company is down nine or ten million pounds, and the machine-minders have got at any rate part of their unconscionable claim — the pro- ductivity concessions in return are merely, I suspect, the seeds of future trouble. 1 have Wondered all along what exactly was the strategy of the management in accepting this confrontation. Now I know: they hadn't any. The Fleet Street mechanical unions con- stitute some of the strongest labour monopolies in Britain, and to do battle with them requires a clear-sighted ruthlessness of Which our newspaper managements seem Incapable. There are only two ways at pre- sent in which these unions can be worsted. One is to sack the strikers, tell all the unions to go to hell, and get the paper out in the teeth of the entire labour movement — the sort of strike-breaking the Washington Post carried out successfully a few years ago, us- ing helicopters and all sorts of gadgetry. It would be very difficult indeed in Britain, because of the huge legal privileges of the unions, the extent of the closed shop everywhere and, not least, because national newspapers need to use special trains, and are of course controlled by the NUR cald ASLEF. The Financial Times could be printed abroad — in the long run, I suspect, It will have to be printed abroad — and the management dropped dark hints that they Were going to mount such an operation this time. But it was all bluff, of course. I doubt If there is a management in Fleet Street suf- ficiently stout-hearted to embark on such a drastic course or capable of the minute con- tingency planning needed to carry it through 5 to success.

The alternative is to isolate the offending Union and apply the full financial squeeze

on the others. If a score or so of machine- minders or a handful of electricians, say, stop work and so stop the paper, then the rule should be: nobody gets paid anything. It is amazing how quickly 'the solidarity of the workers' evaporates in such cir- cumstances. But so long as the rest are get- ting paid, left-wing agitators among them will always turn them against the manage- ment. This, surely, was the lesson of the long strike at the Times. Idle people who are still getting their money, especially idle journalists, always turn sour and bolshie. Employees must be made to recognise that the non-appearance of the paper is a catastrophe for all, not just for manage- ment and shareholders. All workers must be made to suffer financially right from the start; only thus will they be driven to adopt the drastic measures needed to end greedy and irresponsible union power. Now under the present law it is impossible to guillotine wages and salaries the moment the product ceases and the firm's income stops — Fleet Street's bosses have been vainly urging the Government to put through statutory changes to make an instant cut-off lawful. But even under existing conditions it is possible to apply the financial screws to a considerable extent. The unwillingness of the Thomson management to do so was one principal cause of their defeat in the Times strike, because at no point did other unions, or individual members, put pressure on the recalcitrant to settle. The Financial Times made the same mistake this time.

Its object seems to have been to use the other unions to beat the NGA. But, without financial sanctions, how was this possible? The notion of Len Murray and the TUC breaking the power of a hard-boiled closed- shop monopoly craft union like the NGA is preposterous. It could happen in West Ger- many, of course, where the central union body was deliberately given constitutional and financial weapons to discipline in- dividual unions. But in Britain the TUC is just a bit of cardboard. If anything, it exists to promote and spread strikes, not to end them. It might even go so far as to expel the NGA. What difference would that make? The TUC needs unions more than unions need the TUC. The NGA would just carry on as though nothing had happened.

There is no foundation for the FT management's apparent belief that, with the TUC on their side, they could bring out a paper without NGA labour. If they had tried to do so, the most likely outcome would have been to incite the NGA to bring all of Fleet Street to a halt. Certainly, the FT management would have got little or no cooperation, in practice, from other unions. It is notorious that the national organisations of the print and other mechanical unions cannot deliver their Fleet Street chapels. Even if national ex- ecutives had declared a non-NGA paper white, •local chapels would probably have blacked it. I doubt if NUJ members would have been willing to work in these cir- cumstances. It would have been a quite dif- ferent matter if getting out the paper was the sole condition on which anyone got paid. That, I think, would have detonated an explosion of common sense all round.

This dismal FT business serves to rein- force the point I have often made here. Fleet Street's strike problems can never be solved, or even substantially improved, so long as unions are permitted by law to operate absolute labour monopolies. That is the heart of the difficulty. If you try to set up or apply a monopoly in the supply of machinery, or paper, or ink or anything else that Fleet Street uses, the law is down on you in a flash. If you even try to save a newspaper by buying it, you are up before the Monopolies Commission and treated like a potential criminal, all kinds of ludicrous conditions being imposed on you to ensure good behaviour. But if you operate a monopoly of labour — if you say openly and adamantly, 'This newspaper cannot be produced unless you employ my machine-minders' — then you are absolute- ly legal and there is nothing whatever that the newspaper, or the public, can do about it. The exemptions for unions, of course, date from those distant days when they were weak and helpless. It makes no sense today. It is monopoly in its crudest, most destructive and anti-social form. It is at its most blatant in Fleet Street, because newspapers are a peculiarly volatile and vulnerable product, but it is active in many other areas of British industry. In my view, labour monopolies — linked as they are to the closed shop — constitute the most odious aspect of British trade unionism. So long as they are left untouched, no thoroughgoing plan of union reform is possible. Until Norman Tebbit tackles them, he will remain, in my eyes at least, not much more than a paper tiger.