The press
The issue is monopoly
Paul Johnson
There are a number of separate but related issues in the National Graphical Association dispute which hit Fleet Street last weekend. The first is the attitude of the unions to jobs. In theory, the unions, and the NGA in particular, ought to regard Ed- die Shah as a benefactor. He is a skilful and energetic businessman who has created the Messenger group of newspapers and so pro- vided a large number of jobs in an area of high unemployment. He and his like are just what the country needs. But there is one snag about Mr Shah. He is not prepared to bow his neck to the diktat of union officials. He expects union members, even the NGA, to observe the terms of their work contracts like everyone else: and when they do not, he is prepared to sack them and employ people who do not hold the NGA card. Now here we have the truth about the union bosses. When it comes to a choice between maintaining jobs, on the one hand, and maintaining union power and privilege on the other, they will always opt for union power. The object of their mass picketing in Warrington, which has been carefully organised and paid for by the union, is to stop Shah's business as a lesson to other employers that the rule of the unions cannot be defied. The fact that the jobs would be destroyed too is a secondary matter in their eyes.
The second issue is the use of mass Picketing to enforce union power. The failure in 1972 of the local Chief Constable to enforce the existing law on picketing at the Saltley Coke Depot ushered in the era of union anarchy and hyper-inflation which made life so miserable for us all in the Seventies. Some people optimistically believed that the advent of the Thatcher Government had ended that sort of thing. The law against mass picketing has indeed been strengthened, and there is now no ex- cuse at all for a police failure to prevent this king of intimidation. Yet people saw from the TV screens last week that it still goes on, and they want to know why. From the Government: silence. One got the impres- sion last weekend that, with Mr Thatcher absent in India, Britain had no government. It is quite right, of course, that the Govern- ment's sensible policy of keeping out of industrial disputes should be maintained. No one wants to see the union bosses again lording it in 10 Downing Street every time they create a crisis. But when the law is visibly being abused, one expects some kind of assurance from ministers that they intend to uphold it. It is an ill omen that Leon Brit- tan's utterance on this point had to be drag- ged out of him by an angry letter from the Institute of Directors. Who would have thought we should have to be 'waiting for the smack of firm government' from the Thatcher administration.
The third issue is that we are now seeing tested, for the first time, the implications of the 1982 Union Act. The 1980 Prior Act, though by no means contemptible in some respects, did little to punish unions for act- ing unlawfully. An employer damaged by an unlawful strike could seek financial redress in the courts only from the in- dividual union official who had wronged him. The act was invoked in the late sum- mer of 1982 by Fleet Street managements against the electricians' leader Sean Geraghty, whose men had inflicted £10 million worth of damage on the industry. He was fined a dervisory £350, and his group are still in a position to knock hell out of Fleet Street as a result of his quarrel with his own union. So the 1980 Act has clearly proved useless in this respect.
The 1982 Tebbit Act, by contrast, allows wronged employers to sue the union itself.
The courts can fine the bigger ones up to £250,000 a time, and sequester their funds if they refuse to pay up. Mr Shah invoked the 1982 Act and won his case in the courts.
The NGA at present owes £175,000 in fines and costs, and its assets have been ordered to be seized because it will not pay. Last weekend, by way of revenge, it pulled the plug on Fleet Street, which had nothing to do with the dispute. Its attitude can be sum- marised thus: we only obey those laws we see fit to obey, and if laws we reject are en- forced against us, we will inflict the maxi- mum damage in our power against anyone we are in a position to hurt.
The Fleet Street managements responded to this unprovoked assault in two ways.
First, they all agreed to take individual ac- tions under the 1982 law against the NGA for stopping their papers and damaging their business. In theory each of the managements can collect up to £250,000, which is more in line with the losses they have suffered than the miserable fine im- posed on Geraghty. So a lot of litigation is pending, both in Fleet Street and at the Warrington end. Events are moving fast, and what I write may well be out of date by the time you read it. But this new-found spirit of unity among the Fleet Street publishers ended strictly at the decision to litigate against the NGA, and it remains to be seen whether they stick even to that. What they could not agree on was whether to sack their NGA members, as they were entitled to do in the circumstances, unless they receive effective assurances from the union that there would be no repetition of the walkout. No such assurances were received, and at that point the publishers split. Some weakly gave in to the NGA straight away; most of the rest weakly followed the next day; and the Murdoch papers, for reasons of their own, weakly brought up the rear on Wednesday. If any- one wants to know why the unions run Fleet Street, they have only to study this contrast between the resolution of the unions in de- fying the law, and the nervousness of the publishers in resorting to it.
The last and most important issue is the blatant use by the NGA of its labour monopoly. This dispute, in which a closed shop monopoly union can, at a stroke, stop the newspapers because it is annoyed by something that happens in a provincial town, brings home to us the absurdity of our monopoly legislation. What is the point of having laws against monopoly, and a Monopolies Commission, and taking enormous trouble to prevent monopolies of ownership and supply, if the monopoly of the most important commodity of all, labour, is absolute and legal? The problems created by British trades unionism, not least for Fleet Street, can never be solved until a government has the courage to tackle labour monopoly at its source, by making the closed shop illegal.
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