AN EYE TO THE MAIN CHANCE
The press: Paul Johnson
welcomes the progress of journalists from status to contract
IN THE early 1930s, Stanley Baldwin, then leader of the Tory Party and number two in MacDonald's National Govern- ment, told a young man in the Conserva- tive Research Department: 'There is one political thinker who has had more influ- ence on me than all others — Sir Henry Maine. When I was at Cambridge his authority was complete and I never ceased to be grateful for all I learned from him.' The young man, whose name was Frank Pakenham, asked: 'What would you say was Maine's supreme contribution?' Bald- win paused, then said with great convic- tion: 'Rousseau argued that all human progress was from contract to status. But Maine made it clear once and for all that the real movement is from status to con- tract.' Then he paused again, this time for rather a long time, and a look of some bewilderment passed over his face. 'Or was it,' he added, 'or was it the other way round?'
I like this story because it illustrates the ultimate futility of academic instruction in preparing people, not least those who might be presumed to be most in need of guidance — our future rulers — for life in the real world. Like Isaiah Berlin's hedge- hog, Baldwin thought he had got at least one big idea, the fruit of his Cambridge years, but found on inspection that he could not quite remember what it was. The story also highlights the extraordinary diffi- culty empirical-minded Englishmen, espe- cially perhaps successful ones like Baldwin, experience in grasping abstract ideas. One can't imagine the story being told of his continental contemporaries — Leon Blum, say, or Edouard Benes.
All the same, what Baldwin originally thought Maine had said was, more or less, true and it is an important point. Status is, in a sense, anonymous; there is no merit in It• Contract implies individual recognition and worth. To move from one to the other Is an advance, like changing from a feudal to a commercial society. I well remember signing my first contract, as opposed to just `getting a job'. It was, and I felt it to be, a huge step up in the world. To have a contract was a sign of success, a measure of importance: you used the words 'my con-
tract' with a touch of pride (an even grander term was `service agreement': that is what board members had).
It is characteristic of trade unions, who place collective welfare, or at any rate their own supposed role in promoting it, before the interests of individual members, that they do not like personal contracts. They prefer that workers should rely on their status as paid-up members of the union rather than negotiate separate deals with the bosses. Well, they would, wouldn't they? However, in the newspaper world the movement from status to contract is gathering pace. Since the Wapping Re- volution, which put management back in the saddle, it has been a feature of journal- ists' wage negotiations. In the Mirror Group, once one of the most subservient to the unions, a new proposal to introduce individual journalistic contracts is being fiercely resisted by the NUJ. One member of the chapel told UK Press Gazette: 'They want to do away with collective bargaining and break the power of the union. I suspect most journalists will be very angry and not willing to sign individual contracts.'
Most journalists? It may be true that a majority of the kind of journalists who attend union meetings, fill in their ballot forms and read the union newspaper, do indeed dislike individual contracts and
performance-related pay. But then, these are not the kind of journalists who make good newspapers. After all, journalists are fundamentally writers. They are bemused by the magic and majesty of words. However dusty and cynical they may be, inside them, struggling to get out, is the deeply chaotic, anarchic, autarchic spirit of the writer, with his passionate individual- ism, his belief in his own God-given uniqueness. No writer worth tuppence wants to be part of a field-grey army of word-tradesmen, on hourly rates and over- time, however munificent. His ego screams out for individual recognition. A writer may welcome, say, a standard contract drawn up by the Society of Authors (not many do, actually) but when it comes to his own book he still wants an individually negotiated bit of paper. Journalists who believe in their work are not essentially different.
Indeed, in the history of newspapers most journalists, and virtually all the good ones, have always made their own financial arrangements with editors and proprietors, often of a peculiar nature and not neces- sarily written down on fancy legal forms. Some of them may have been swindled but they kept their pride. The NUJ, as a serious collective negotiator, was swept in on the tails of the much more muscular print unions, in the quarter-century before Wapping when they ruled the roost and editors and managements were in despair. Then, indeed, the union-type journalists did well. They got higher standard rates, shorter hours — the four-day week in some cases, and even 'sabbaticals' — and terrific job security. Nobody was sacked, nobody moved much, nobody did much work, there was only a narrow differential be- tween the highest- and lowest-paid, the system and the spirit stagnated. There was little money left for foreign news coverage, special ventures or any of the exciting experiments which keep newspapers alive. There were no new newspapers either. In those days I used to advise editors to employ as few staff as possible and use freelances; to young people I'd say: 'Don't go into journalism, it's dead.' The 1980s legislation and the Wapping upset shifted power away from the unions and gave the kiss of life to the newspaper scene. Journalists may not get such long holidays as before and more of them are now made to earn their money, but all the reasonable improvements in their pay and conditions have been kept. The difference is that merit, and especially outstanding merit, are much more likely to be re- warded. It is a career open for talents again and the spread of individual contracts will keep it so. Those who don't like it can join the civil service. Those with the true itch to write will relish the new winds of freedom and the struggle for survival. That most exotic of flowers, the written word, flourishes best not in the kitchen garden but in the jungle.
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