When offices are closing around you
THE GUARDIAN Media group provoked outrage when it closed down the local offices of its weeklies in Lancashire and Cheshire earlier this year. 39 jobs were lost as the remaining staff were moved to a central office in Manchester.
But Bethan Dorsett kept her head when all about her were losing their jobs and was able to secure guarantees of voluntary redundancies and even an improved pay scale for the hard-pressed reporters.
Bethan Dorsett has been Mother of the NUJ Chapel at the Greater Manchester Weeklies (South) for only a year but was able to steer her members through the crisis with the minimum of damage and to win their admiration for the way she did it.
Her deputy Jennifer Williams says: “One of the main requirements for being a union rep has got to be an abundance of patience and time — neither of which are freely available to a weekly newspaper reporter.
“It can be a difficult and sometimes thankless task, but she has guided her chapel through the darkest days of our company’s history without letting her own professional work suffer — a pretty impressive feat.”
The dispute over the redundancies — which affected the Manchester Evening News as well as two groups of weeklies — came to the verge of industrial action, before Bethan Dorsett succeeded in negotiating the agreement that saved some of the compulsory redundancies and introduced a higher rate for the reporters’ pay of £25,000 a year — not bad for weeklies.
The three chapels — MEN and two weekly groups — are being combined into one. The veteran Mother of the MEN chapel, Judy Gordon, says: “Being an MoC/FoC is hard work if you are doing it properly. It’s still hard if you are an old hand at it. And it’s very hard if there is trouble.
“For someone young and inexperienced to be thrown into one of the biggest crises at any company is particularly taxing, but Bethan Dorsett proved herself adept at guiding, advising and inspiring her members.
“I have been a chapel officer for most of my 35 years in journalism, but I still learned a great deal about what it really means to lead during our joint dispute.”