The great Times disaster
Eric Jacobs
The shutdown of Times Newspapers should have been an election issue, perhaps the issue. You might have expected Margaret Thatcher, apostle of radical change, to excoriate the print unions' reluctance to enter the twentieth century, or James Callaghan to damn the management for its arrogance. But this did not happen. The Times is a real test case of Britain's industrial decline, and the politicians have no answer to it. It took reports of violence in Germany last weekend, when The Times attempted to print the first of what was to have been a series of weekly editions, to get the story back in the headlines. Until then it had had little appeal, perhaps because the rest of the media has as many industrial skeletons rattling around in its own cupboards and cannot bear to contemplate anybody else's.
The story of The Times is truly a parable for the times. Like the rest of Fleet Street and much of the rest of British industry, its production methods are quite out of date. A year ago, the management at long last decided to do something about it. The result, so far, has been total impasse. Every month or so hopes rise among the journalists that they will have their papers back, only to be just as regularly dashed. The only unambiguous achievement to date has been the disappearance from the streets of the Sunday Times and The Times for longer than at any other time in their combined 400-year publishing history.
Here, surely, was a high theme for the politicians to descant upon — the decline of Britain, as witnessed by the failure of two of the country's most authoritative organs to appear, even during a general election. But they did not descant, and it is not hard to understand why. All the soothing and healing resources of the industrial relations system have been brought into play, and they have had no effect. The Secretary for Employment, Albert Booth, the General Secretary of the TUC, Len Murray, and the chief of Acas, Jim Mortimer, have each stepped out on to the stage, only to hurry off again when they realised they could do nothing. Neither the Tories nor Labour have any remedies to offer for this kind of industrial deadlock, and they know it. Far better and far easier for them to swap insults about strikes and taxes.
What has gone wrong at Times Newspapers? The answer does not lie in the general terms of the company's proposals to the unions. True, it wants to reduce staff, but by the usual measures of British industry its methods are not harsh. There is to be no compulsory redundancy. In some areas, those who want it have effectively been guaranteed a job for life. Those who wish to leave can collect handsome redundancy payments. For the great majority of those who stay there will be rises in pay. In any case, levels of employment and pay are negotiable matters and the company is in the mood to negotiate.
The roots of the impasse lie deeper than money and have to do with less tangible things than jobs. At heart, it is a question of power. Print unions in Fleet Street have acquired a degree of control over their working lives to which other workers may aspire but few achieve. They hire staff, arrange their shifts, their holidays and their days off, they allocate the work, tot up earnings at the end of the week and even have veto powers over the appointment of their own supervisors. In many areas they operate as labour sub-contractors in all but one crucial item: they do not have a contractor's responsibility for fulfilling their contracts. This way of life depends above all on a union acquiring and then preserving an exclusive monopoly for its members over some part of the intricate process by which newspapers are produced. Territoriality is the key issue, and if anything disturbs a union's rights over its particular patch, then the whole arrangement is in danger of collapsing.
Among all the changes Times Newspapers wants to bring in, the one that carries the most obvious threat to a union preserve is the new electronic typesetting technology. I am writing this article on a piece of paper in a typewriter, so a second pair of hands will have to work a second keyboard to put the article in type before it can be printed in the Spectator. But with the new equipment The Time wants to operate, I shall be able to work at a keyboard on which I shall not only be able to write my piece but with the self-same tap on the keys set the type. No second keystroke will be necessary.
This innovation threatens to eliminate an ancient craft. Until 100 years ago, all type was set by hand. Then came the Linotype, a sort of monstrous clanking typewriter, which mechanised the process. At that time, the old hand-setting unions were fearful that the new work would go to noncraftsmen. In the event, they won the day and kept possession of the new keystroke for themselves. But although the technique changed, typesetting with a Lino remained a distinct function. It wasan expert job and no journalist could be expected to do it at the same time as he was composing his piece. But now the micro-electronic revolution has finally de-skilled the job and obliterated the need for a separate typesetting function.
Although the new technology is the most obvious threat to traditional union controls, Times Newspapers' plans also contain subtler and less obvious threats. The company wants its management to have a far freer hand in allocating work, setting priorities and making at least minor changes in work patterns. It does not want to have to consult the chapel fathers on every occasion. In short, it wants what it calls 'the right to manage' and the unions call all kinds of other, less flattering, names. Rightly or wrongly, the unions see in what The Times Is trying to do an attempt to dismantle the structure of power they have built up over many decades. Still, whole systems of industrial power like these have disappeared in their time. And perhaps they would be on their way out at Times Newspapers, too, but for the balance of another kind of power – the power of the employer to enforce his demands.
That kind of power has wholly eluded the company. Contrary to the popular mythol ogy, the company did not lock out its staff when it suspended publication on 30 November last year. It put on notice those who refused to sign new agreements with it: a very different matter. In a lockout, as in a strike, people are not fired. Instead production is suspended and staff are not paid for the duration. But the course the company chose was much less speedy. From the beginning of this year, the end of each week has seen more and more Times staff out on the streets, dismissed. But by mid-March there were still more than 1000 on the company's books who had no agreements with it and another 1000 who had. This gave the unions vital time to find new means of resistance. Magically, the supPosedly over-manned Fleet Street opened its arms to the refugees from Gray's Inn Road and took them in. Levies were taken among other print workers and at least two of the print unions report they have enough money in their special Times kittys to look after their unemployed members for three months without even going on another fund-raising trip. There is certainly anxiety and distress among staff who have been fired, but as yet there is little sign of hard ship.
With all the benefit of hindsight it is easy enough to say where the company went wrong. It should have picked off its problems of overmanning, technology and so forth one by one, instead of lumping them into one great package and trying to solve them all at once, in what has come to be known around the office as the 'big bang' approach to industrial relations. Or it should have locked out its staff. Or it should have given more time for negotiations last year. And so on and so on. I agree with all these criticisms, with one proviso: I am not convinced that any other strategy of modernisation would have worked any better.
All the conventional incentives to settlement have failed, and there is now an increasing sense of desperation in the air. Only the lack of any plausible alternative could have driven the company to its doomed attempt to publish The Times in Germany. The irresistible force of the oilrich Thomson Organisation has met the immovable object of the print unions; and both sides seem to be capable of preserving their present immobility for ever.
Previous page
