Press
Something has to give
Robert Ashley
There is reason to believe that the journalists on the Daily Express must be the best-read writers in the world. They've got to be. The house agreement the chapel there has just negotiated with the management contains a clause whereby all NUJ members receive £6 a week to buy newspapers (the cost of buying all the dailies, weeklies and Sundays is a staggering £5.82 a week, a figure that stopped me in my tracks when I first added it up). Since I'm prepared to bet £5.82 that not every NUJ man at the Express reads all the papers, the clause can only be a concealed pay rise. But why bother concealing it? The pay rises being negotiated at present are so big that another fiver or so a week hardly matters. Let me give you a few examples:' the Express — £750 on the basic; the Guardian — an offer of £800, not yet accepted by the Manchester and London chapels; the Mail — £400 all round, plus 5 per cent on individual salaries; the Financial Times — £810, plus merit money worth 3.8 per cent of salaries, plus a telephone allowance of £65 a year; the Sunday Times — £850 extra for the £5,000 a year man; the Telegraph — the NUJ chapel is asking for 25 per cent; the Mirror — the London chapel is asking for rises of about 60 per cent, which would bring salaries to more than £9,000 a year.
However you look at them, those are pretty substantial figures. And when you think how many papers have lost issues recently because of industrial action, you can see why so many newspaper accountants have fingernails bitten down to the knuckles. The Guardian lost all its London editions last Wednesday, the Telegraph, the Mirror, and even the Financial Times, were badly hit, the News of the World got walloped, and the troubles are by no means over yet. The industry simply cannot afford such losses at such a time.
. The Reed Group annual report — Reed own IPC and the Mirror Group — reveals just what industrial action can do to a paper;. Tim Mirror Group lost 70 million copies" last year, which means a revenue loss of £3 million and a profit loss of just under £2 million. At a time when all costs of production are roaring upwards, that is the way to the edge of the precipice. Most of the lost issues were casualties in the battle against overmanning, a battle which was fought in three stages, one against the NGA, one against Natsopa, and one against Sogat. Alex Jarratt, the Reed Group Chairman, is, however, confident that the battle has been won: "But
the agreements have now been reached and we can look for a period in which, with the co-operation of the unions, the division can implement its plans to secure an enduring and profitable operation. Apart from the cost of industrial disruption, the division paid out more than £1 million in redundancy, again with the object of reducing manning, particularly at senior levels." But with Mirror men asking for £9,000 a year, doesn't that make them into "senior levels"?
Discussions about overmanning. usually concentrate on the print unions, but it is just as true that there is overmanning on the journalistic side, too. A national daily last year sent a reporter to the Far East for three months and never used a word of his copy. It wasn't that it was unusable: on the contrary, it was good. But there wasn't room for it, and there wasn't room for the reporter. His trip was just to get him out of the way for a bit. And that is by no means an isolated example. Go into any bar in Fleet Street and listen to the moans about "never getting a piece in the papers these days": you can hear' them every day. It is significant that when the management of the Observer made their statement a week or so ago about how shaky the paper was, they said they could not continue without drastic manpower cuts among the print unions and the NUJ memberships.
But, agreements or no agreements, as national unemployment nears the million mark, with forecasts that next year it could reach two million, unions are going to be very wary about accepting any form of redundancy, however humanely it is handled. As John Bonfield, general secretary of the National Graphical Association, said at a conference recently held under the auspices of Printing World, it is all very well talking about the long term and all the changes that are going to have to be made, but "the short term .not be sacrificed." In other 4ords, reduced manning agreements are for some time in the future, not for now.
Nobody can blame union chiefs for wanting to hold on to what they have got. Nobody likes to have a membership a large proportion of which is out of work. If they can be ke I t in work — even in unnecessary lor non-jobs) well and good. 8'only from the point of view of the uni9n members. Because the intarfY simply cannot afford it any longer. At that same conference, Duke Hussey, manag
ing director of Times Newspapers, said, "It is an unpalatable fact that they [newspapers] are grossly over-staffed. Half of our processes are reasonably manned, but the processes themselves are becoming largely unnecessary. The other half consists of processes which will continue to be necessary but which are unreasonably manned."
So something has got to give. Perhaps one way would be to get rid of some of the traditional customs and practice. The trouble at the Guardian last week is a nice little illustration of what I mean. The paper has just appointed a new head printer. There was one man short on a shift. The NGA men demanded that, in accordance with custom and practice, the wages he would have received should be handed over and shared out among the shift. The head printer said that it may be their custom and practice, but it wasn't his and they weren't having the money. The board decided that since he was new to the job he was clearly starting the way he wanted to continue and they had better back him to the hilt, Which they did. With the 'result that it was all over in no time There's a moral there somewhere. And it's a moral that the industry will have to learn soon. Very soon.
Robert Ashley, like his predecessors, Tadpole, Punchdrunk and Walter Plinge, is not very mysterious
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