Strike vote as £40m-a-year Desmond offers 3%
NUJ MEMBERS at Express Newspapers in London are voting on strike action following a breakdown in talks over pay.
Journalists are furious that the company is refusing to increase its pay offer above 3 per cent, well below current levels of inflation. Employees at the company’s printers recently won a pay award of 4.3 per cent.
The NUJ chapel, which covers the Daily and Sunday Star and their offices in Glasgow and Broughton, Lancashire, wants a rise of 10 per cent and a one-off bonus payment to all staff — and for casuals — to reflect the company’s healthy financial position.
Proprietor Richard Desmond, boss of the Northern and Shell group that owns the titles, paid himself £40.6 million in 2006. The Times described him as “the most lavishly remunerated owner in Fleet Street”.
Northern & Shell’s annual turnover has increased more than eightfold to £460 million since it bought Express Newspapers in 2000.
Chapel officials estimate that the 3 per cent pay rise would cost the company £750,000. To pay the 10 per cent would set them back £2.5 million — about 6 per cent of Richard Desmond’s income.
But when he met union reps last year he said: “You want to give proper wage increases but you can’t because everything else has gone up.”
Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ President and chapel rep at the Express, said: “It’s hard for members to see why we should stomach a pitiful pay rise when the proprietor pocketed over £40 million. Management has treated the union with contempt, imposing a settlement that amounts to a pay cut without meaningful negotiations.”
Union reps have been trying to negotiate the increase since last October.
They have been told by editorial director Paul Ashford that if they accept 3 per cent there will be “no beastly staff economies this year to make everyone insecure and miserable.”
There have been successive rounds of redundancy since Richard Desmond bought the titles, with editorial staff falling from 968 to 532 between 1996 and 2004, the last year for which figures are available.
NUJ National Organiser Barry Fitzpatrick said: “Journalists feel they have no choice but to ballot for industrial action. We’ve done everything we can to come to an agreement with management but they simply aren’t taking our members’ concerns seriously.”