Political commentary
The gold watch syndrome
by Ferdinand Mount
Somebody must be wrong. In the past couple of weeks I have not met or heard of a single manager or journalist on a newspaper other than The Times and the Sunday Times who believes that Times Newspapers have acted sensibly. Indeed, many of those who do work for The Times or the Sunday Times have been not only queasy about the prospect of a shutdown but also sceptical of the expertise of their employers. In public, managerial solidarity exacts a show of optimism. But privately, one is told again and again that the threat of a shutdown was the wrong threat to issue, the timing was clumsy and the tactics can achieve nothing that could not have been achieved by other means and at far less expense.
That does not mean that the pessimists are unsympathetic or unappreciative of the provocation that was endured. Other Fleet Street editors have been quick to offer Mr William Rees-Mogg and Mr Harry Evans bowls of hot soup and the hospitality of their columns!Rival managers concede that Mr Duke Hussey and Mr Dugal NisbetSmith have had a particularly appalling rash of unofficial strikes to cope with and, as they know from their own experience, a bunch of ornery union leaders. And yet the most that anyone will say in praise of the stand taken by Times Newspapers is 'Rather you than me, old boy' or 'I must say, you're miles braver than we are' — implying miles more foolhardy.
Is this not strange? For are not managers and journalists constantly moaning that someone ought to 'stand up to the unions'? Is not the conventional wisdom that it is because managers have been too wet to manage that the unions have been allowed to get away with murder? And is not the amiable Mr Hussey fulfilling the dream of every assistant features editor and junior production manager, namely to 'sort out those buggers downstairs'?
It appears somehow not. The rhetoric of confrontation seems to ring hollow when a concrete example manifests itself. Why, even if Times Newspapers were to achieve the agreements it wants at the cost of a brief shutdown or no shutdown at all, do most newspaper people instinctively feel that the company would be unlikely to have achieved anything valuable or lasting?
Guarantees of continuous production, like all guarantees of good behaviour, are comforting but unreliable — particularly when extracted under duress by nannies, magistrates or managers of newspapers.
Even when those who give the guarantees sincerely mean what they say, their mood may change later. Trade union leaders, even imperial fathers of chapels, are subject to death, retirement and re-election. They cannot bind the future.
In the minds of Times Newspapers managers, they are dealing with a work-force of basically loyal operatives who have been led astray by a handful of militant rabble rousers. In the Sunday Times Sir Denis Hamilton speaks of 'the moving loyalty to their papers of so many printers, journalists and van drivers' and of the many people he sees who 'have 'completed thirty or forty years service who are receiving a customary gold watch on retirement.' Mr Louis Heren, the convivial deputy editor and himself the son of a Times printer, recalls how loyal printers got the paper out during the Blitz and the Generaj Strike and even themselves produced the edition announcing the birth of the present Queen after the journalists had gone home. At any moment, one expects to hear how Lady Astor used to sing 'Knees Up Mother Brown' with the compositors in the canteen at Old Printing House Square.
I don't mean to suggest that these feelings of loyalty and pride are shallow or artificial. But are they the crucial factors which determine the behaviour of union branches and union officials? Negotiating is the profession of full-time union officials; their dignity and their wage packets demand that they be engaged in a continuous tussle with management; it is essential that management put them in a position from which they can return to their members claiming to have scored brilliant victories. Mostly playacting, no doubt. But denied these boasts, they can assert their usefulness only by closing the joint down. And if the management deprives them even of that pleasure, what is left for them?
And very nice too, if the power of the chapel officials were destroyed, the cardcarrying union-basher replies. We would be that much nearer a genuinely free society in which we should all, unionised and nonunionised alike, be better off. Unfortunately, though, what the management of a highly complex, easily interrupted process like newspaper production needs is not less union discipline but more. The underlying aim of Messrs Hussey, Brunton and Nisbet-Smith is to restore the internal discipline which trade unions used to exert before the easy money and slack management of the Sixties let things slip. But how can defeated generals pull together an army which was defeated precisely because the enemy directly and successfully challenged the generals' authority and discredited their methods?
The Big Push is counter-productive. And I fear that it is only because the civilised Spectator 2 December 1978 paternalists who run The Times have an anachronistic view of the relationship between masters and men that they cannot see this. If they were less nice, they would not have issued this threat, because they would have a more realistic appreciation of the fact that trade unions and trade union officials are driven by interest not sentiment, and that amour-propre tends to overcome loyalty. That is why genuinely tough managers play a different game. Mr Victor Matthews at Express Newspapers alternates between what might be called the Exposed Salient and the Second Front Now tactics. When the union try something on, they must he firmly resisted. On the other hand, if there Is a chance of diverting troops to a different battlefront, it is to be snatched. Hence the launching of the Daily Star in Manchester, The Manchester printers jump at the chance of more work. And the staff of the Daily Express can be painlessly reduced, by transferring some to the new paper. On the Sun Mr Rupert Murdoch has put a stop to the pernicious practice of late-night blackmail by ordering that any middle man" ager who gives in to union demands in order to get the paper out should be sacked pronto. This simply restores the balance of interest. Previously, when the printers stopped the machines because the floor was mucky or the paper had broken again, the manager on duty balanced the rocket he would get the next morning if the paPer, failed to appear against the trifling sum °I the paper's money he was being asked to distribute. Now his job is at stake. Such simple penalties are no more the total answer to running a newspaper or anY other business than shooting deserters is the solution to the problem of morale. But thea imposition does recognise that war be well-matched adversaries is inevitably a Long Slog. I don't use the war-ganie metaphor to imply bilious hostility hut rather to point out in industrial relations certain interests may inevitably be opPosed:, The printers are said to be `short-sighteo. Are they? For a generation or more they have managed to preserve a hugely well; paid and notoriously excessive number 01 jobs. On the whole, they seem to have mastered the knack of giving in just before, the newspaper collapses under them. An even with the new technology they have collared the lion's share of the available jobs. And moreover, managers are no!'' fully aware that the 'de-skilling' involved in computer setting is deeply hurtful to the pride of skilled men. The Daily Express, for example, has taken care that the new set-.4 should be not silent and clinical like a tyPing pool but noisy and cluttered and difficult looking like a Caxtonian composing room. One of Fleet Street's notoriously tough managers says, 'Look, one of our coinpositors is earning £17,000 a year. It would be deeply humiliating for it to be revealed to all the world that he isn't really worth that money.' Is it such a bad life to earn seventeen grand and have one's feelings taken into consideration?
Previous page
