‘I just couldn’t be a PA strike-breaker’
I WAS DISTURBED to read (November/December issue) that the PA Chapel is not recognised by management.
The two once enjoyed a cosy relationship — indeed, a “rapport” as it was called by the chapel father and former union president Harold Pearson — but it was a rapport which ensured that industrial action by provincial journalists aimed at improving their lot had little chance of success because PA copy could always fill the papers.
It was at the ADM at Wexford in 1974 as the delegate of Law Courts Branch that I became aware of how efforts to improve the appallingly low pay of provincial journalists had been thwarted repeatedly by strikebreaking copy from the PA.
A chief sub on one of the country’s foremost provincial dailies was getting far less than the lowest paid reporter at the PA.
Many of us felt most uneasy about being repeatedly a professional strikebreaker and the chapel decided to assert itself as a trade union body. A strike vote was carried.
But the late Mr Pearson crossed a picket line of his own colleagues to go to work and said afterwards that he had come in on his day off especially to cross it.
He later transferred his allegiance to the Institute of Journalists.
I, having proposed the strike, became mud in the eyes of the management, and in those of many of my strikebreaking colleagues, although they had themselves been provincial journalists.
Eventually I felt obliged to quit. As one of the few High Court journalists to be called to the Bar, and having covered extensively all the superior courts for 15 years, I think I had made my mark.
I opted for the murky world of bureaucrats and cranky academics in college lecturing (I would recommend it to no one) but at least, despite a sizeable drop in salary and pension rights, I was able to sleep at night knowing that I was not stealing from my colleagues’ pay packets.
Tony Richards
Former Secretary, Law Courts Branch