Journalists in all offices are facing big changes in their work as everything goes online. One of the union’s largest chapels, at the Guardian, has spent two years negotiating for a fair deal
Kings Place: not yet Camelot
IT’S THE most ambitious and best-planned integration scheme yet launched by a British newspaper — but, as the Guardian moves into its sparkling new round-the-clock multi-media newsroom, no-one is sure how well it will work.
Kings Place is in the hitherto run-down area around London’s King’s Cross station — only a couple of minutes from the NUJ head office — which is in a process of massive regeneration. It’s like a 21st century equivalent of London’s Docklands, where the media clustered after the last technological revolution, the introduction of computers 20 years ago.
NUJ reps have been in more or less continuous negotiations for 21 months over the terms of the merger of the former newspaper and website staffs. All will work together for print and online — yet even after all the talking there are persistent disparities that worry the union.
“There are lots of things yet to be worked out,” says Hélène Mulholland, who recently stood down after three tiring years as mother of the 540-strong chapel, one of the union’s biggest. “There is no blueprint for this.”
The nearest equivalent to such a “big bang” introduction of multi-media working on UK national papers, at the Telegraph group, is “an example of how not to do it,” she says.
The Telegraph also moved into a custom-built newsroom, two years ago, but did so in the most brutal way, without consulting the union, sacking hundreds of journalists along the way and engendering enormous resentment among staff, as managers conducted a purge — that is still going on — of journalists deemed to be too traditional in their outlook.
There have been ructions, too, at big regional offices — notably in Cardiff, Birmingham and, most recently, Glasgow.
Other national media have followed a more gradual path and the Guardian itself has been pursuing editor Alan Rusbridger’s goal of a fully integrated operation over a period of years: it was the first paper, 30 months ago, to go “web first” in its news operations and its website leads the world.
There have been generational tensions at the Guardian as well, but they have been well managed, largely thanks to the union.
The website has been recruiting journalists on terms far inferior to those enjoyed by the newspaper staff and their struggle for parity was taken up by the union. The company then sought to level down conditions — hours, shift patterns and so on — rousing a degree of union resistance.
But the chapel absorbed the discord and approved an “enabling agreement” as the foundation of the merged workforce in November 2007, by 211 votes to 27.
The enabling agreement included a two-year pay rise worth upwards of 9 per cent and a minimum salary of £30,000, which was up 7.1 per cent on the lowest rates on the website; the company had previously allocated £500,000 to raising salaries on the website. The deal also retained the ban on compulsory redundancies in the former agreement which managers had wanted to drop.
It was not, however, the end of the process. In the year since then the chapel has met little success in eliminating the remaining differentials and, as the subs take their places in the new building, there will be people working side by side, doing the same work, with disparities of more than £10,000 a year between their salaries.
“The biggest bugbear is that we move to Kings Place with a big pay gap between the web and the newspaper staff,” says Hélène Mulholland. “The vagaries of pay remain unresolved”. Even the company’s own consultants have described the situation as “pay anarchy”.
“Inequalities between journalists working like-for-like across web and paper have been untenable from the beginning but with people now working across all platforms they are intolerable,” she says.
A pay audit by outside experts to sort out the mess and work towards a fair pay banding system was a key union demand in exchange for signing the enabling agreement. The chapel has been trying to establish terms of reference for such an audit, but it has found that existing job descriptions are unfit for such a purpose. Many people, apparently, had no job description at all, and integration means that most people have now got new ones.
The company’s earlier idea for sorting out the structure was a botched “skills matrix” exercise, which did lift the earnings of many website journalists, but was clearly unfair for others, says Hélène Mulholland. “Reporters did very well but others did very badly, notably the subs. Chief subs on the website earn less than reporters and substantially less than those on the paper,” she says. A website sub can still earn as much as £8,000 a year less than a reporter and even chief subs earn £6,000 a year less.
In the last few months, as the paper and website have been joining forces, a whole new range of jobs has been created, she adds. “A lot of members complain that they have effectively been demoted. They do not lose salary but professional pride and kudos. There used to be 12 different job descriptions for subs that have been streamlined into just four, and a lot of people with years of experience were put into the lowest category and they feel pretty narked. The chapel is taking on that issue now.”
Then there is a problem with non-staff journalists — casuals and those on fixed-term contracts. The Guardian was taking on people on fixed-term contracts, saying it was because of the transition process. But they were outside the terms of the house agreement, which allows them only as cover for specific gaps in staffing, such as maternity leave. The chapel took up the matter and won an agreement that those whose work is assessed as comprising 80 per cent of that of a vacant full-time job can take it without having to apply a second time.
The question of casuals, as in many places, is more persistent. In law, anyone who works in a job for 12 months continuously is entitled to employment rights. The Guardian has a practice of laying off regular casuals as they approach that deadline. After ten and a half months they stop getting hired for a spell. And, on top of this, the casual rates paid on the website, as with staff salaries, are still lower than on the paper.
In the build-up to the move journalists on the website and the paper have been swapping jobs to familiarise themselves with the new work. This has been welcomed by the union, but has had the effect of drawing attention to the inequalities in pay.
As the work gets under way the union is asking members to monitor their workloads and hours in Kings Place to make sure that integration is not increasing them. “We have to be disciplined and assess the impact on our journalism and ourselves,” says Hélène Mulholland. “It is work in progress.”
Failings in the system crop up in every big workplace — identifying them is not a sign of the NUJ’s ineffectiveness, but its strength. At the Guardian the union is in a position to tackle them. With a chapel now of 540 members — up by 120 over the last three years — and a leadership able to attend to this kind of detail, it can win terms as good as those anywhere.
Barry Fitzpatrick, the union’s chief organiser for newspapers, says the Guardian chapel has done “a very impressive job. Every paper that hasn’t already will be going through this process and if all members are as well looked after as those at the Guardian, then they’ll be OK.”