Tables on the turn
Of Britain’s four big regional newspaper groups, Northcliffe Newspapers has been the toughest for the NUJ to crack. Owned by the Daily Mail group — another non-union stronghold — its managers have held the NUJ at bay for 20 years. But now things are starting to change
JOURNALISTS across Britain are achieving increasing success in winning the right to wage bargaining at the regional titles run by Northcliffe, one of the most vehemently anti-union companies in the British media.
In the face of management antagonism, fear among the workforce about being identified as a union activist and time-wasting tactics by the company, chapels are thriving across Northcliffe and new candidates for recognition are emerging all the time. Members of several of them met in Bristol in June to co-ordinate their approaches to the company.
Two years ago the Bristol Evening Post was the only legally recognised Northcliffe NUJ chapel — a distinction achieved by a protracted campaign led by the long-suffering former Father of the NUJ Chapel, Derek Brooks.
Then members at the Leicester Mercury under Mother of Chapel Lis Gibbs fought their own lengthy battle to achieve recognition, quickly followed by colleagues at the Western Daily Press in Bristol, who now have a joint chapel with the Evening Post.
This year has seen members at the former Trinity Mirror weeklies in the South East of England win a ballot for recognition. TM had put a number of titles on the market, some of which had NUJ recognition, some of which did not. Northcliffe bought those that did not, and on those papers, where the union had not been strong, journalists suddenly decided to fight to get union rights. It was as if they felt that with their new owners they needed union representation more than ever before.
Now a resolution looks imminent in Swansea, where staff at the South Wales Evening Post and associated weeklies are nearing recognition success after a masterful campaign to rebuild the chapel and win majority support in the newsroom.
NORTHCLIFFE chapels have been in touch with each other before but the new group chapel, whose first meeting was instigated by NUJ Northern Organiser Chris Morley, puts the relationship on a firmer footing.
After all, Northcliffe, is a nation-wide group in Britain with a coherent management structure, and to counter its industrial strategy the union will have to be equally co-ordinated. As things were, the NUJ had suffered a series of setbacks in its recognition bids, notably at the Sentinel in Stoke on Trent and the Gloucester Citizen.
Journalists in Stoke have twice got as far as holding a ballot of staff under the arcane procedures of UK employment law, which require that a union must either be able to show it has majority membership in a group of staff known as the “bargaining unit” — that is, all the employees in a distinct section of the company — or win a ballot held under the auspices of a government agency. At Stoke — and at Bristol and Gloucester — Northcliffe tried to rig the process by including in the editorial bargaining unit all kinds of non-editorial workers who were not even eligible to join the NUJ.
They then started to apply the pressure on members by threatening the loss of pay rises or promotion. If you want the union, managers said, you’ll get nothing more out of us.
But now contacts between the chapels have helped them rebut smears put about by Northcliffe. In Swansea, staff were told that if they won recognition it would put an end to merit payments and all staff would have to accept the same pay increase, claiming that this had happened in Bristol. The Bristol chapel was able to supply a point-by-point rebuttal of these and other arguments.
Further successes are expected. The chapels that have won recognition in the teeth of Northcliffe opposition hope their example will encourage others in offices where staff have no union representation.
Paul Breeden, until recently Father of the Chapel at the Western Daily Press and Evening Post, said: “Northcliffe is one of the most difficult companies to work for in the British media, especially for union activists, which makes it all the more heartening that so much has been achieved by NUJ members at the company in the past couple of years.
“Chapels at Northcliffe are used to an atmosphere of fear, to dealing with a company that wants its workforce to be seen and not heard, and to continual stonewalling by management — staff at Bristol are still waiting to start negotiating their wage claim three months after it should have been settled.
“All this makes union representation more necessary, not less, and it’s great to see that across the country Northcliffe staff are prepared to stand up for each other.”