Print union under pressure

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Maxwell trying to get the Park Royal SOGAT FoC and Chapel to see it his way THE Messenger Newspapers dispute in Warrington and Stockport was not only a major defeat for the working class on anti-union laws, but also specifically a heavy defeat for the NGA.

For years the NGA has been under increasing threat from new technology. Its strength as a union was built up in the days when typesetting was a skilled craft job, done with metal type. Niw computer phototypesetting enables the same quality job to be done with little more than basic typing skills.

The most advanced computer techniques permit the whole process from dratt article, through sub-editing to typesetting, page-plan and pasteup, to be done on the same equipment or even by the same person.

The employers, obviously, want to use these techniques to reduce their wage bills and break the power of the unions. They would like to see journalists and tele-ad staff putting copy directly into the computer.

This, 'direct input' or 'single key stroking' would cut out NGA typesetting jobs.

In the US, many papers have introduced these practices, and as a result the NGA's counterpart, the International Typographical Union, has been decimated. On Fleet Street, Times workers were locked out for months in 1979 over issues including new technology: but so far the NGA has remained relatively intact.

Even a small free-sheet operator like Eddie Shah had a big battle to get his operation non-union, with direct input. But Shah's victory gives a signal for bigger operators to follow.

There are two immediate flashpoints. WB Commercial Graphics in Derby is considering legal action against the NGA because the union has cancelled the agreement it had with the company for direct input.

Magazines

Commercial Graphics typesets and lays out magazines on contract to publishing houses. The magazine journalists type their articles into computer equipment in the magazine vffices, and sub-edit it using that equipment's facilities. The finalised copy is then sent on 'floppy disks' ', or even by phone, computer-to-computer, to Derby, where it becomes input for the computer typesetting equipment there.

NGA members operate the equipment in Derby - but their job is largely confined to setting formats. The NGA is now insisting that the magazine copy be supplied to its members Derby in typescript form - as an article would normally come from a journalist - and then typeset by them into the Derby equipment.

According to NGA officials, they agreed to direct input at Commercial Graphics because they thought that the company was taking copy from non-union publishers, and thus bringing extra work into the unionised sector. According to the company, the NGA knew all along that they were taking copy from unionised publishers.

Commercial Graphies boss lan Burns does not seem to have the makings of an Eddie Shah or a George Ward. His first reaction was to say that he would close down the typesetting side of his business, and concentrate instead on the other side - developing and selling computer equipment for typesetting and page-planning.

The other flashpoint is the Portsmouth Evening News. The NGA has national negotiations on direct input with the Newspaper Society, collectively representing the provincial press.

The Newspaper Society is dead set on direct input. Certain firms - like the Portsmouth and Sunderland group, owners of the Portsmouth Evening News - have pushed harder than the Newspaper Society collectively, and the NGA has given more ground to them.

Portsmouth and Sunderland say that they are prepared to go non-union, and they will have direct input with or without the NGA by the end of this year.

As the second stage of a three phase introduction of direct input, the NGA and the Portsmouth Evening News are discussing proposals to transfer some sub-editing work - normally a National Union of Journalists job — into NGA jobs.

NUJ The NUJ, predictably, is furious: the scheme simply means shitting some of the squeeze resulting from new technology from the NGA onto the NUJ. NGA members are not too happy with this sort of scheme, either.

On the magazine Motorcycle Weekly (where, as at Commercial Graphics, the NGA is now taking a harder line), there was a scheme for NUJ members to do direct input, and 'in return' NGA members could do some sub-editing. In practice NGA members did none of the sub-editing, and that clause was merely a figleaf to cover NGA abandonment of control over the typesetting operation.

Fleet Street is likely to be the next stage, after the magazines and the provincial newspapers have blazed the trail.

The NGA's present policy amounts to little more than a head-in-the-sand attempt to slow down technological development as much as possible. Any actual struggle to save jobs, even on that primitive basis, deserves support, just as the Luddites in their day deserved the support of all workers. But the policy offers no more chance of winning in any medium or long term than the Luddites' did.

It promises to lead to a fiasco - not only worsened wages and conditions, but a comprehensive collapse of the union.

The first condition for effective resistance is workers' unity in the print. Craft exclusiveness and jealousy is especially disastrous at a time when the very economic basis of the old crafts is disappearing. Yet, despite lip-service to unity, the NGA tries to poach from the NUJ in Portsmouth and scabs on SOGAT in the Maxwell empire (see last week's Socialist OrgOn the basis of workers' unity, a policy can be mapped out to turn new technology to workers' advantage: reduced working hours, work-sharing without loss of pay, workers' control of production, comprehensive training and re-training programmes under trade union control.

The new technology contains many more possibilities than those that the bosses cherish. It could, for example, provide the basis for a'much more varied press, less subordinate to the Fleet Street barons. It makes the sucialist policy of media open to every shade of working-clas every shade of working-class opinion and directly accessible to the ordinary worker, much easier.

But to realise those possibilities will require a different policy from the unions - in practice, and not just in words. SOGAT 82 general secretary Bill Keys is a TUC left-winger, and a ready hand at strong speeches against anti-union laws.

But, as the story told by the SOGAT workers at Robert Maxwell's Park Royal plant makes clear (this page), he has been far from leading any fight against Maxwell and the BBC in the dispute over the Radio Times.

Maxwell and the BBC have used the courts repeatedly to try to stop sulidarity action with the Park Royal workers in dispute over jobs, wages and conditions - in particular, action to boycott the distribution of copies of the Radio Times normally printed at Park Royal.

Since Maxwell says he will not reopen Park Royal, the workers there can scarcely hope to win without such solidarity.

But as we go to press, the SOGAT executive is due to meet on Wednesday February 1 to hear a report from negotiations with Maxwell for the liquidation of the dispute.

SOGAT and Maxwell's BPCC stated jointly on Monday 30th:

"Negotiations led by Mr Ted O'Brien, general officer of SOGAT 82, accompanied by the London branch secretaries, will be resumed tomorrow with a view to restoring distribution of the Radio Times in London"

The carrot being offered by Maxwell is that he will open a new printworks in East Lundon and offer the ex Park Royal workers jobs there.

But Maxwell wants out-ofLundon wages and conditions for this new works - and he wants to produced a new Lundon evening paper there, undercutting Fleet Street.

Meanwhile, the Park Royal workers are still occupying the plant.