The press
Treating gentlemen as hacks
Eric Jacobs
In 1926 The Times printed a slim volume, anonymously written and privately circulated, which told how the paper struggled to keep going throughout the General Strike. I was intrigued when I first came across it in a Highgate bookshop, all the more so when I found the copy in stock came from the library of the late Sir Campbell Stuart, for many years a director of The Times and the organiser in both world wars of various sorts of propaganda and intelligence capers.
Alas, the book turned out to be very tame stuff. There were no revelations and hardly any names, except of those, like Major Astor, whose names were beyond discretion. Even fifty years ago, it seems, fear of union reprisals dictated a caution amounting to blandness.
But one thing did stand out from the grey pages, and that was the role played by the journalists. They did everything they could to keep the paper on the streets. They hand-set type, tied and manhandled bundles of newspapers and even formed patrols to keep the not very menacing pickets at bay patrols manned by gentlemen of the Sporting Department, naturally. The book refers, de haul en bas, to the `Natsopas' but nowhere does it mention the National Union of Journalists.
In a word, the journalists blacklegged. But that notion does not occur to the author of Strike Nights in Printing House Square as the book, in the manner of a musical comedy of the period, is whimsically entitled. To him, and no doubt he was one of them, the journalists were just doing their job. There was nothing odd about it. The book breathes journalistic self-confidence as though the rest of its cast, from Astor _downwards, existed only to serve the editorial cause.
That sense of editorial primacy has been on the slide for years and it has now surely received its comeuppance at Times Newspapers. Three weeks ago management unveiled its proposals for a new deal with the journalists at The Times and the Sunday Times, now yoked together within the Thomson Organisation. The NUJ chapels at both papers must sign agreements with the company by the end of November, or their members will be put on four months notice of dismissal. If the fifty-two other bargaining units among which the rest of the papers' employees arc divided also sign new agreements, then the journalists will get a rise of 1500. But if the other unions do not sign the journalists will get no money and the two papers, along with their supplements, will cease publication until the management gets the agreements it wants.
In the company's proposals, the functions of journalists are for the first time strictly defined and demarcated. Journalists will henceforth take their place. within a company-wide wage structure. Their pay will rise, if at all, on the same date every year as that of all other employees. They will enjoy similar fringe benefits. Perhaps journalists will be better off than other members of the staff; in future, though, the difference will be one of degree, not of kind.
This sort of shift has been in the making for a very long time, but the form in which Times Newspapers has chosen to try to resolve its profound industrial troubles has compelled it to articulate the journalists' new status with an almost brutal clarity. However they may like to think of themselves, journalists cannot avoid the fact that Spectator 18 November 1978 from now on they will be just another set of hired hands.
When I joined the Sunday Times a dozen years ago, the NUJ existed in it only as a torpid outpost of the chapel run by the London staff of Lord Thomson's regional newspapers, who still then shared with us the old Kemsley offices in Gray's Inn goad.' There was no such thing as a journalists house agreement, and while we expected w benefit from the modest rises negotiated annually by the union for all its Fleet Street members, what really interested us were the rises that were doled out every July according to individual performance. To get nothing at all was a wounding experience indeed. A decade of incomes policies has put paid to all that. Now journalists, like everybodY else, must make do with the going rate, whatever that may be. And to get the most out of it they must band together. No inch" vidual can get a system of extra payrneat for, say, merit or service past the Gov" ernment's scrutineers on his own account; only a union can do that for a groan. Inevitably, the union has loomed more and more important in journalists' lives. Not that Times journalists have yet resorted to action. The industrial disputes that have cost the two newspapers millions of copies and of pounds in lost profit this year have had nothing to do with them or their union. But that has not prevented the management from seeking to place similar constraints on journalists as on others. The company left itself little choice once it had decided to try to restore control over unofficial disputes through a series of chapel treaties. To have offered radically different terms to different chapels would have opened it to charges of discriminati° and to the prospect of failure. so Out' nalists' behaviour will in future be governed by an elaborate set of procedures grievances, for disputes, for discipline with penalties identical to those laid na other chapels if the procedures are Ot observed. And that is not all. Just as the company is attempting to seize back the managerial control it has lost to the chapels in production areas, so the editors are trying to sharpen up their prerogatives, especiallY over who shall get pay rises and who write what and where. InitY Perhaps in the short run such neW arrangements will make little difference t°' the working style of Times Newspapers journalists. Many of the clauses in the pror osals spewed out by the word-processa machines hired by the company to handleli its crisis paperwork do little more than sPe out what has previously been the unvvritte.,9 practice, while many others relate to the OP unfamiliar world of computerised news paper production which Times journa are being invited to pioneer in the natio" press.
But in the longer run the difference run very deep. If journalists are to ht treated like the other employees of Flee, Street it would be surprising if they did no start to behave like them too. Not least, I slisPect, in the little matter of the closed shop, that ingenious device which has, above all others, helped to propel so many newspaper workers into the higher tax brackets.
The company has laid out its negotiating strategy in a way that might have been calculated to make the closed shop issue a bLe't one again, even though that is the last thing management wants and in spite of the fact that the journalists themselves have sshol,vn little enthusiasm for it. For if the two NUJ chapels successfully negotiate agree ments the minority of journalists who do not belong to the union will benefit from the £500 rise that will be part of the deal; but if the chapels fail to agree, then union members will be handed their notice, while non-members will not.
Could anything be better designed to arouse the majority who are union members and complete the conversion of that traditionally moderate corps of men, who cut such loyal figures in Strike Nights in Printing House Square, into outraged militants, for all the world like a new breed of `Natsopas'?
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