Declarations of independence
TIM GOPSILL, retiring as editor of the Journalist after 21 years, looks back on how the NUJ has survived the traumas it has been through during his editorship. He puts it down to journalists’ ‘pig-headed independence’.
IN OCTOBER 1991 the Journalist’s centre pages asked solemnly: “Is this the union’s darkest hour?” It probably was. Treasurer Bernie Corbett wrote that the NUJ was £1.5 million in debt to the bank and there were £500,000 in outstanding bills, on a turnover of £2 million a year. Oh, and the overdraft was £100,000 over the limit.
A year later John Foster — a tough and determined figure — took over as General Secretary. He recalls: “Within a day of taking the job I had the bankers telling me not to write any cheques. I was very annoyed. I said I had been elected as General Secretary and it was my job to run the union.”
There’s no particular reason why they should, but most journalists in Britain and Ireland have no idea how lucky they are to have their own independent union, because they could easily have lost it.
Throughout the 1990s the NUJ’s very existence was shaky as a combination of financial crisis, falling membership and internal feuding nearly brought it down. The real cause was not, however, any failing within the union but the turmoil wrought upon the industry by technological change — the induction of computers into the newsroom.
It seems strange now that such a convenient working implement should have caused such trouble, but this was an industrial revolution; the current turmoil around digital technology is just an aftershock. The problem for our industry was that computers put thousands of people, the compositors who reset the journalists’ copy for the press, out of work overnight.
At the same time the media employers, emboldened by cumulative reductions in employment rights brought in by the Thatcher government of the 1980s, and by its general hostility to trade unions, began to tear up their union agreements and “derecognise” them — no longer allowing them to represent their members.
The NUJ responded to both threats as a union should: it went to great lengths to work with the print unions to minimise the impact on their members’ jobs, by agreeing an “accord” allowing comps to retrain as sub-editors — which a number did, with some success. And it resisted derecognition with a series of heroic and protracted strikes.
These were widely supported as symbols of labour movement resistance to Thatcherism, but they were nonetheless defeats — and they cost more than £1 million in strike pay. On top of this, derecognition cost the union thousands of members who said they could see little point in paying their subs if they NUJ could not do much in their workplaces.
From a high of nearly 33,000 in 1981 NUJ membership fell to below 22,000 in 1994. Twice the union’s bankers threatened to stop honouring cheques and in 1991 a third of the staff had to be laid off, including eight of the 18 full-time organising officials.
SO THAT’S where we were in the 1990s. That the union has recovered its membership to the current 37,000 — which includes 3,000 students — is proof of the success of the slow and steady recovery masterminded by John Foster.
There were spending cuts — including the Journalist being restricted to six issues a year — enforced by a rigorous budgeting process. There was very little industrial action and the union even built up a fighting fund to finance the strikes that began to occur with the NUJ’s reviving strength in the early 2000s. Recognition was won back in many places, and even the number of full-time organisers has risen again, to more than 20.
John Foster won his own recognition in the union’s centenary year, 2007, with the award of Membership of Honour. His loyal deputy John Fray told that year’s annual conference: “Without him we would have gone under”.
John Foster did more than that: he gave the political lead to a campaign within the TUC for reforms to employment law that re-established the right of employees to be represented by their union. It was not an easy campaign: the bigger traditional unions, notably in the public sector, who did not suffer derecognition to the same extent, did not want to know and dismissed the NUJ as maverick boat-rockers.
But after years of persistence the campaign succeeded and New Labour, winning power in 1997, adopted the Employment Relations Act — very much against the grain of its general pro-business approach. Without that law to reverse the effects of derecognition the NUJ would definitely have gone under.
NOT THAT it would have disappeared completely; that could not have happened. The fate the union could have faced was merger into a bigger union. That is what happened to the printers, their unions broken by the computer revolution. To try to pool their strength the NGA and SOGAT merged to form the GPMU in 1991 and in 2004 the GPMU, with membership dwindling, was swallowed up by the giant union Amicus, which itself in 2008 joined the former TGWU in a mega union called Unite, where the printers now form a tiny rump. For the first time in hundreds of years there is no proud guild or union for printers in Britain.
Following such a path would have meant further losses of membership for the NUJ. British and Irish journalists prize their independence and, however compelling the arguments for survival might have been, a large number would have refused to have anything to do with any amalgamation, even with other unions in the media.
But during the 1980s the union came quite close to merging. Uniting with the print and broadcasting unions was seen as a way of combining the strength of workers right across the media, and the leadership actively pursued this goal. It became an article of progressive NUJ faith to declare belief in a combined media union.
Two things brought the whole edifice crashing down. First was the election as General Secretary in 1990 of Steve Turner of the Daily Mirror on a strident “no mergers” ticket. That made it clear once and for all that even if an amalgamation deal had been arranged it would never have been endorsed in the ballot of the membership that would have to have been held.
The second, strangely, was that no-one really wanted us. The NUJ had held long and tortuous merger talks with the mightiest of the former print unions, the NGA, in the early 1980s, but these too had collapsed in acrimony.
The cultural divide between the unions was simply too great. The NUJ’s pig-headed spirit of independence and democracy was too strong for the authoritarian mindset of the NGA leadership; the actual breaking point was the independent editorship of the Journalist, which they found incomprehensible.
More recently the NUJ has had tentative talks with the broadcasting union BECTU, covering the sharing of buildings or facilities, but even these have come to nothing.
The last two decades have seen a rapid concentration of British trade unions, with many smaller unions disappearing into the two or three biggest ones. A joke went around the NUJ in the 1990s to the effect that in 10 years’ time there would only be two British unions left: the NUJ, and all the rest. “Nothing wrong with that” would be many journalists’ response.
One of the dominant NUJ figures in the turbulent years of the 1980s was Aidan White, the leader of the NUJ side in the talks with the NGA, who became General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists. He put it like this: “The journalists’ place in the industry needed to be autonomous because we had to protect the independence of our work. Journalists’ strength depends on their identity. Without it the journalists’ union and community would disappear.”