Press
The old men of Fleet Street
Robert Ashley
It is a measure ot how far my devotion to the call of duty exceeds the normal bounds, and how far my obedience to the commands of my readers borders on the subservient, that I have spent the weekend reading a book with the unappetising title of Industrial Relations in Fleet Street. The more cynical of you will have already retorted that it can't have taken me very long, since there aren't any industrial relations in Fleet Street worth talking about. And you'd be right — up to a point, as Lord Copper's secretary said so memorably in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. But it is probably true that, despite the generally deplorable state of affairs down EC4 way, more time there is spent in worrying about labour relations than about any other aspect of newspaper production — not excluding editorial content and the rocketing price of newsprint.
The book is published by Basil Blackwell at a staggering £5.50, despite the fact that it has only 185 pages, and no pictures of unclothed ladies, as our more successful newspapers tend to do. It is by Keith Sisson, who is a lecturer in industrial and business studies at Warwick University, and before that was Labour Secretary to the Newspaper Publishers Association. He must therefore be presumed to know what he is talking about.
• There were occasions, reading this book, when I was damned if I did.. Mr Sisson is of a mathematical, or at least a statistical, turn of mind, as may be deduced from the fact that, the book contains no fewer than fifty-six tables, some of them of daunting complexity. I am sure, however, that the more suitably qualified of you will be able to cope with them, although I think the minimum qualification could involve being a Senior Wrangler with plenty of time on your hands.
The book's title is a misnomer. It
isn't about industrial relations in Fleet Street. It is about pay structures in Fleet Street. And not everybody's. Just those of the print unions. Mr Sisson's excuse for excluding the members of the NUJ from his study is that there would not have been space to do them justice in the same volume. And it isn't about print union pay structures in Fleet Street today, because it stops at 1970. As so much has happened since then, one wonders why he didn't go further? His explanation is two-fold: "If the study had been continued beyond 1970, it would not have been possible to preserve the identity of the Daily Mail and the Daily Sketch, which were merged in 1970" (he's wrong; they were merged in 1971). And second: "Also, it seemed sensible not to include more recent information in case it prejudiced the outcome of negotiations taking place at the time Of publication." That's a risk I would have taken. Most newspaper discussions take place against a background of information which is already years out of date. It would have been nice to have one in which the information wasn't out of date. Just for a change.
I must, however, not criticise the book for what it is not, despite which I feel compelled to tell that what it quite definitely is not is an easy read. If you're looking for something to curl up in bed with, try Ethel M. Dell. Mr Sisson can fairly object that he didn't set out to write a romantic novel. I know he didn't. But presumably he did set out to write something somebody was going to read. I can tell you from bitter experience that it will be a resolute fellow (well, how nice of you to say so, sir) who gets through it all. Since the book is one of the Warwick Studies in Industrial Relations, it is obviously intended for a rather specialist readership. But that readership surely includes Fleet Street managements and the print unions? I can assure you I can't think of more than half a dozen of that lot who will breast the finishing tape. Try. this for size: it is the heading to table 8.3. "Analysis of variance: comparison of mean square deviation (MSD) of earnings increases of individual office-occupation groups from the average earnings increase of, respectively, their offices and their occupations."
Nevertheless, with the aid of tranquillisers and a stout spade it is possible to unearth some treasures from this book. Here's a small example: Mr Sisson has analysed the ages (he would, of course, say "age distribution": dammit, he does) of people throughout the industry. He shows that the proportion of production workers in Fleet Street over the age of forty-one is higher than it is in most other industries. Some of the figures are staggering. More than three quarters of the publishing department (practically all of them members of Sogat), who bundle the papers up as they come off the presses and send them on their way to you at home, are over the age of forty-one. Since there were 2,398 publishing people employed in the ten Fleet Street offices Mr Sisson studied, that means an awful lot of elderly chaps around in that department alone. Even worse were the piece case hands, those chaps, members of the National Graphical Association, who produced the large type for headlines, and so on. No less than 95.5 per cent of them were over the age of forty-one.
These are impressive figures by any standards.They do little more, however, than confirm the subjective impression of people like the newspaper executive who told the last Royal Commission on the Press that because of the absence of a retiring age in certain unions, their members "can go on as long as they can stand up." Or of the Mirror Group executive who told me that they had, in their building, more than 350 men over the age of sixty-five, and eleven over the age of eighty. But at least those impressions have now been confirmed by Mr Sisson's researches. We can all argue a little m'ore authoritatively as a result of his book.
, I -think that, it is a -pity, though, that Mr Sisson didn't develop his discoveries about age. Surely a workforce with a high proportion of men who can remember, at first hand or from being told by their parents, what the bad old days were like, is going to be more intractable than a young workforce would be when it comes to discussing "protective", restrictive, practices? And surely an older workforce, almost by definition, is going to be more resistant to the idea of changes in technology especially when those changes are as radical as the industry knows them to be? It would 'have been nice to have heard Mr Sisson on the subject.
On that last point, I'm in total agreement with Mr Percy Roberts when he wrote a week or two ago that the industry really could be about to achieve something. The NGA assistant general secretary recently spoke frankly about overmanning, admitting its existence and suggesting that now is the time to do something about redundancies before it is too late. This is Fleet Street's great chance. If it muffs it, God knows what will happen.
Mind you, if the Government, or the next one, doesn't beat inflation God knows what will happen to the industry too. As a tiny, but very revealing example of the sort of thing that newspaper and book producers are fighting against, look at the inside of the dust-jacket of Mr Sisson's book. The price of £5.50
is marked on a little sticker. The sticker does not, however, as you might have thought, cover up an earlier and now over taken price. It covers nothing at all. In other words, the rate of inflation in the industry is such that Basil Blackwell had no idea,when they started publication of the book, what the costings would be by the time they'd finished. Things have come to a pretty pass, as they say, when you've got to that state. But if the result of it all is the collapse of Fleet Street, at least in this bookyou've got enough facts to sit back and examine, in absorbing detail, just what was going on in what now seem the Golden Days before 1970.
-ma
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