Picketing special

Peter Paterson

Returning by train from Manchester to London a couple of weeks ago, I fell in. with a small crowd of National Graphical Association printers going home after a long day on the picket line outside the War- rington works of the Stockport Messenger group of giveaway local newspapers. Some may have been a little the worse for wear from alcohol, but most seemed more in- ebriated by the excitement of the dispute, the scenes of action they had been part of on the picket line, and an absolute faith that their union would refuse to pay the £50,000 fine for contempt imposed earlier that same day by the High Court in Man- chester. Returning by train from Manchester to London a couple of weeks ago, I fell in. with a small crowd of National Graphical Association printers going home after a long day on the picket line outside the War- rington works of the Stockport Messenger group of giveaway local newspapers. Some may have been a little the worse for wear from alcohol, but most seemed more in- ebriated by the excitement of the dispute, the scenes of action they had been part of on the picket line, and an absolute faith that their union would refuse to pay the £50,000 fine for contempt imposed earlier that same day by the High Court in Man- chester.

That initial fine, as we know, was not paid and has now been followed by another, together with an order for the se- questration of the NGA's assets to enforce the payment of £175,000, including costs, due as we go to press. Before this week is out the fine could have doubled again. Put- ting conference rhetoric into action, as the NGA is discovering, can be an expensive business.

My travelling companions down from Manchester confidently predicted that the Fleet Street newspapers would be halted. And equally confidently they predicted that however they might huff and puff, the na- tional proprietors would never use the Prior- Tebbit laws to sue the NGA for damages. We shall see, though my hunch is that the pickets are right: the disarray already shown by Fleet Street in dealing with the assurances — or lack of them — offered by the NGA about continuity of publication during the dispute is a sufficient indication of their resolve.

But it is not only the Murdochs, the Rothermeres and the Hartwells who have been thrown into confusion by what for two months or so has been an obscure local dispute. Faced for a moment with the nightmarish prospect that it could all develop into a general strike which they would certainly lose, the burghers who sit on the employment committee of the TUC fell into a state of dither similar to that of the newspaper proprietors. Bound to sup- port the NGA under the terms of a brave programme of resistance to Prior-Tebbit it rolls off the tongue just like Mason-Dixon or Taft-Hartley — the TUC is nonetheless deeply miserable over the violence of the NGA's picketing and the union's insou- ciance towards the courts.

Besides, it is widely assumed in union circles that much of Prior, if not Tebbit, was drawn up with the printing unions primarily in mind, with their resistance to modern technology, their devotion to the closed shop, their assumption of managerial hire and fire prerogatives, and their habit of secondary industrial action to put the squeeze on employers. Print unions derive from an older and more ruthless tradition than most of our unions, they are institutionally rich, and their Fleet Street members have become a plutocratic by- word. They are not greatly loved by their brothers in the wider movement.

So the initial tepid response of the TUC must have disappointed the homegoing pickets on the train. They were euphorically predicting a great united heave by the entire trade union movement to smash Prior- Tebbit and the Government as well. Perhaps it seemed that way at the time, but they were forgetting large-scale unemployment as a determinant of union behaviour, and the holes it has left in the purses of the union leaders. Above all, they were forget- ting that few trade unionists are ready to impale themselves and their own futures on the barbed wire of public indifference only five months after a Tory victory at the polls.

What the pickets were perfectly clear about was that only one man could end the chaos. If Mr Eddie Shah, the Messenger group's boss, agreed to reinstate the six NGA members he fired in the course of a closed shop dispute, they said, the dispute could be settled at once. Our conversation, of course, was before the fines were multi- plied, and even Mr Shah cannot bail out the NGA if the union persists in its refusal to pay. One begins to be frightened for the pension of Mr Joe Wade, the retiring general secretary, for if things go on as they are, the union will become bankrupt.

Mr Shah, however, makes a nerve- wracking martyr for the free enterprise lob- by. He is a member of the NGA himself,

several times he has appeared to promise the reinstatement of the six during negotia-

tions, and he apparently has no rooted ob- jection in principle to the closed shop. He could, and does, change his mind frequent- ly. And while on some mornings he sounds very brave, on others he seems to want to escape being cast as a latterday George Ward of Grunwick fame. What he pro- bably, and perfectly honourably, wants most of all is to be allowed to get on with his business of distributing freesheets around the north-west.

Not that Mr Shah appeared like that to my NGA friends on the train. To them he was a sinister figure, probably backed by Arab or Iranian exile money (he is of Per- sian descent) who was lighting the fuse under the NGA with the object of destroying the union. The police were his brutal accomplices in this cause, together with the national press, which for months had deliberately been concealing the scale and seriousness of the dispute by confining reports to the northern editions, thus keep- ing the more militant southern members of the NGA in the dark about what was going on.

The six members sacked by Mr Shah were regarded with great sympathy. Indignantly it was pointed out that they had given up well-paid jobs in Carlisle, moved house, transferred their children to new schools and generally inconvenienced themselves to resettle in the Manchester area and work for Mr Shah. Moreover, they had used their skills to train inexperienced labour in the mysteries of typesetting, only to be dismiss- ed when Mr Shah reneged on a closed shop agreement.

To one of the printer-pickets, the treat- ment of the six was the touchstone of the whole affair. 'If our union can't get them reinstated, employers all over the place will feel free to take on non-union labour. Thousands of our people will be sacked. What chance would we ever have of getting them their jobs back if we can't do anything for the lads in Stockport?'

The logic is inescapable. The new genera- tion typesetting machines have the same basic keyboard layout as typewriters, rather than the different order found on Linotype machines. NGA men themselves often need retraining to work the computer keyboards: only trade union solidarity prevents jour- nalists accustomed to QWERTY keyboards from setting their own copy in type. The NGA does indeed have a great deal to lose.

But the irony is that Mr Shah is basically a union co-operator. He tried to use a clos- ed shop deal as a way of squeezing conces- sions from the union, certainly aware that equivalent operations to his own have done without the union altogether. Nor, incidentally, does he take the same sentimental approach to the six sacked workers as my companions on the train: he claims they were about to be made redun- dant from their former employment in Carlisle when he stepped in with his offer of jobs. What the NGA leaders must know in

their hearts is that they are fighting a losing battle, not against Mr Shah, but against the micro-chip and the visual display unit, against the ability of any firm to set up, at little cost, its own in-house printing capaci- ty. Fleet Street they are not so worried about, since they know the existing papers would rather put up with the NGA than allow cheap competitors to be launched. Elsewhere they can cope as long as employers like Mr Shah go through the mo- tions of recognising the union and negotiating working arrangements. But what will others conclude when they see that lit is Mr Shah's operation which becomes the battleground rather than the non-union houses? And can even Fleet

Street be counted a safe haven with the tempting hundreds of millions of Reuter money coming along - sufficient for a final showdown with the unions?

I was unable to travel on the picketing special which took hundreds of demonstrators to Warrington on Tuesday evening, nor did I avail myself of the detail- ed directions printed by the Morning Star to Mr Shah's premises. Perhaps I preferred this dispute when it was still reasonably local and totally obscure. Certainly 1 en- joyed the company of the pioneer pickets on the 7.10 from Manchester, and their warm farewells as they collected their single banner from the rack as we came into Euston.