‘They could not have produced the papers’
THE EXPRESS group of UK national papers has been forced by NUJ pressure to cut down on the number of staff it wanted to get rid of.
Richard Desmond’s company announced in August that it was cutting 106 jobs but after a threat of legal action it reduced the planned redundancies to 75, with the number of journalists’ jobs to go cut from 80 to 57.
Express Newspapers publishes the Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday, from centres in London, Preston and Glasgow.
The union told Express Newspapers that the numbers involved required workers to be consulted for three months rather than 30 days planned.
Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ Deputy General secretary and a former Express Newspapers union rep, had talks with the company and said: “The reduction in job cuts was only announced after the NUJ had warned the company that they were not following the right procedure.”
In any case, union officials said, the Express would not have been able to carry on producing the papers with the staff that were left. The head of the NUJ publishing department, Barry Fitzpatrick, said: “The fact they had to face is that they simply couldn’t have produced the papers.”
Michelle Stanistreet added: “While we welcome the reduced numbers we still don’t know how the papers can be produced with the few people who will be left.”