FLEET STREET'S ROW OF DOMINOES
The press: forced by Shah and Hammond
IF FOREIGNERS treat Britain as a joke country, as they increasingly do, we have only our own elites to blame. Quis custod- iet ipsos custodes? While teachers and dons go on strike against the economic facts of life, MPs were last week obsessed by the ridiculous Westland affair, the most clearly bogus political crisis in a generation, although troubles of far greater gravity were developing under their noses. Both the Unionist victories in Ulster, which mean that the majority in the country have declared themselves totally opposed to the Government's policy, and the collapse of world oil prices were ignored by Parlia- ment and only superficially covered by the media. Neither politicians nor communica- tors paid much attention to the third genuine crisis — Fleet Street's Armageddon — though it is much the most interesting and its effects are likely to be very far-reaching.
Broadly, the sequence of events is this. Not one but two personalities have upset Fleet Street's row of dominoes. Eddie Shah wanted to produce the first high- technology national newspaper. Eric Ham- mond and his EETPU wanted to introduce non-political trade unionism to Britain. Their coming together made the Today project possible, threw Fleet Street into panic and convinced its frustrated moguls that they too would have to free them- selves of trade union rule. The first to react was Robert Maxwell. He did not yet possess alternative printing facilities out- side Fleet Street (though he is rapidly acquiring them) so he could not go the whole hog: even so he forced the unions to accept cuts in his workforce of nearly 2,000, reducing it to 4,000 and demoralis- ing the union bosses in the process. That figure of 4,000 cannot and will not stand in my view, and will be cut to about 2,000 as Maxwell's alternative facilities, and so his bargaining position, improve.
Maxwell's success, the threat of Today and, above all, the willingness of Ham- mond to do a deal, persuaded Rupert Murdoch, who did possess the high-tech capacity at his idle Wapping plant, to take on the unions in full-frontal combat. The key here was not just Murdoch's ability to print his four papers using EETPU and non-union labour only, but the willingness of most of his journalists to defy their own union, the NUJ, and help him do it. The fact that Murdoch can get his papers written, printed and distributed, albeit with many imperfections, is a catastrophic defeat for the old print unions and the NUJ. In Murdoch's group alone 5,500 jobs are now at risk, and it has been plainly demonstrated just how parasitical most of these highly-paid jobs are.
The other Fleet Street groups will now be obliged to follow in Murdoch's wake as fast as they can, either by forcing big cuts on the unions in the Maxwell fashion or by doing a Murdoch and leaving Fleet Street. The Express group has served notice that its 6,000-plus workforce will have to be cut by a third, and at the rate things are going that reduction, like the Mirror Group's, will not be enough. Associated Newspap- ers, which now owns the Standard as well as the two Mails, planned to lose 1,000 jobs when it moved into the Surrey Docks in 1988. That is now an out-of-date calcul- ation and both move and cuts will have to be accelerated. The Telegraph group is a little more advanced than Associated, with its Manchester plant already working and its Isle of Dogs plant due to open next year. But faced with the threat of a cheaply-produced high-tech Times and Sunday Times, plus falling sales and huge losses, it will have no alternative in my view but to go fully high-tech this year and drop at least 2,000 jobs. The Observer and the Guardian, two high-cost newspapers, cannot afford to be left behind, whatever their political principles. The more gentle- manly Fleet Street managements claim they have no intention of imitating Max- well and Murdoch: 'No barbed wire fences and Securicor dogs,' as Associated puts it. That tune will change as and when Mur- doch is seen to have cut his costs dramati- cally.
Where will this leave the unions? It looks as though the NGA and Sogat are going to lose at least 10,000 jobs fairly rapidly, and that will knock the stuffing of which there's not much left anyway out of both of them. They are old enemies of course but if they have any sense they will now amalgamate, and then try to get the best deal they can to ensure at least a foothold in Docklands. At the moment the EETPU reigns triumphant there and it is the only union in the industry which is expanding. If the NGA and Sogat continue to use the strike weapon, which is ceasing to work in Fleet Street, they will simply lose their more employable members to Hammond. The bigger the EETPU gets, the stronger will be its ability to help managements to smash the old print unions.
The TUC is appalled by all this but is drifting helplessly on the swell of events, as it did during the miners' strike. Potentially what is happening in the newspaper indus- try is an even bigger blow to old-style political trade unionism than the defeat of Scargill and the wrecking of the NUM. If the TUC surrenders to Hammond, as it did to the AUEW, he will take it as the green light to expand and make whatever deals he chooses with the blessing of the Brothers. If the TUC throws the electri- cians out, they will quickly be joined by the engineers and other unions and become a rival confederation, taking in all the new technologies and leaving the TUC with only the deadbeats. The threat is almost as serious to the Labour Party as it is to the TUC, as Messrs Kinnock and Hattersley would realise if they would stop screaming about leaks and such nonsense for a second and do some quiet thinking.
For journalists this means the end of the NUJ closed shop and the beginning of a new era of freedom and risk. If the NUJ were a realistic union it would join the electricians, for the future of journalism lies in visual electronics. I do not believe the revolution in media unionism can be confined to the printed world. Television is likewise dominated by arrogant monopoly unions, grotesque overmanning and para- sitical salaries inflated even by Fleet Street standards. Television, too, is waiting for an Eddie Shah to set the dominoes tumbling, and once again Eric Hammond will be there to assist the process.
Previous page
