NUJ strike call

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MORE THAN 6,000 provincial journalists in England, Vales and Northern Ireland are to be asked to back an all out strike call against a 3 per cent pay offer from the Newspaper Society.

The call - from the Provincial Newspapers Industrial Council - was backed by an NUJ delegate conference in London last week.

Chapel representatives voted narrowly in favour of a strategy of two one-day strikes on January 20 and 26, followed by an all-out strike from rebruary 1. Ine strike call will now go out for voting to more than 200 chapels [office branches] around the country.

The employers offered between £4 and f6 a week, and less for trainees. They turned down claims for improved holidays, for a guarantee of full insurance cover, and for a streamlined disputes procedure. Maternity and paternity claims and moves towards a reduced retirement age were also rejected out of hand.

Instead the employers warned they were likely to step up the rate of job loss -more than 700 jobs have gone in the provincial sector in the past two years. The chairman of the employers' side announced editorial redundancies in his own head office even while the negotiations were still on.

The PNIC posed the strike over wages as the best way to mobilise the membership against all attacks. Peter Mcintyre, PNIC vice-chair, moving the strike call, said chapel leaderships must vote for the only policy that coul could win the fight. Thers was no purpose in taking half-hearted action that could lead to lock-outs and to strikes over reinstatement instead of strikes over the main battle.

A fervent debate showed that the conference was almost evenly split. But among the calls to accept the offer and duck the fight there was one bizarre voice.

Negative Alan Bott, WRP luminary and NUJ National Executive member, tried to move an amendment to the strike call which was ruled out of order by the conference chair, Linda Piper, as being a direct negative: Undeterred, Bott went to the microphone to declare that the old methods of militancy were finished, and that the membership should accept the offer with regret and regroup in some future existence around the NGA - which, given Bott's stand on amalgamation talks, means regroup around the NGA's bureaucracy.

When his advocacy failed to win the day, he simply voted against tit- strike.

The narrow majority at chapel delegate level probably means a vote against action by the membership. But if the fight at the conference is taken back to the membership, the vote could be close, and at worst could lay the groundwork for the major confrontation that must be coming.

It is a major turn-round: the demoralisation which has gripped the provincial sector over the past three years now seems to be being shaken off by all the most advanced militants - except of course those stuck in the stultifying politics of the WRP.

Patrick Spilling