Horse may have bolted, but NEC opened the door

I quote from the Journalist (May June 2008, p23) Donnacha DeLong speaking at ADM on behalf of the NUJ’s National Executive Council, opposing the reinstatement of the rule that writers should write and photographers take photographs:

“It is one thing to bolt the stable door after the horse has gone, but quite another to do so after it has bolted, enjoyed a long life and died. We removed the rule because it is no longer the working practice in our industry.”

A revelatory quote, that surpasses even Chris Wheal’s praise of the Drogheda agreement as a “fantastic example of NUJ activism”.

Delong, with no trace of irony, admits that the NEC has obligingly held the door open for the horse.

For four years, photographers have been asking for an NUJ Photographic Organiser because our sector has been in the frontline of a crisis that will engulf all of professional journalism.

This had and has nothing to do with technology, which is just a means to an end.

That ‘end’ is burgeoning exploitation, deteriorating conditions, frozen and falling salaries, overwork, declining standards, casualisation, deskilling, work-for-free internships, crowdsourced dreck and the steady emasculation of media quality in favour of aggregated power and wealth.

These are all established trends THAT HIT US FIRST, which is why we were and are crying out for a Photographic Organiser as a strategic NUJ response.

So the NEC airily dismisses all this as just the way it inevitably is. It asserts photographers are disposable because it is too bigoted to understand that what happens to photography today happens to journalism in general tomorrow.

Read your own magazine you blithering idiots: subs replaced by ad designers (p13), unpaid interns now indispensable (p6), papers not paying for copy (p31), fat cat salaries (p8). We told you so.

I’m so sick of these smug little minds. They’re a liability. They do worse than nothing, they conspire against us and make the whole idea of ‘union’ a joke wherein taking subs from photographers is fraud.

‘Change or die’ Darwinism does not only apply to the membership, it applies to the NUJ leadership too.

After 25 years of frustrated, pointless membership I no longer care what happens, but the decision that chapels are free to figure out their own fate could not be more helpful to more of this divide-and-rule attrition.

The NEC has now flung open all the other stable doors.

Tony Sleep

Ealing, London

 

 

 

The Journalist is published by the National Union of Journalists