Upon his return to London, O’Neill opened negotiations with the Bouverie Street union chapels in May 1983. The discussions were held at Wapping and the union representatives were given a tour of the plant so that they could see for themselves its capacity and capability. A myth later developed that the unions were kept in ignorance of what had been constructed at Wapping. In fact, News International had not only shown a video of the plant to chapel fathers, more than one hundred of them and their members had been given tours of the building by the end of 1984. The initial management pitch was that, although Wapping would need fewer workers, those who were employed would be better paid. O’Neill made the assurance that ‘any reduction in staffing would be achieved by natural attrition or voluntary redundancy’ and that there would not be ‘any form of compulsory termination’ for the remainder who continued on at the Bouverie Street plant.9 But this was not good enough for the union negotiators. They maintained that, if Wapping and Bouverie Street were to coincide, the former would have to share the same overmanning and restrictive practices as the latter. This completely undermined the financial rationale behind the new plant. While O’Neill calculated that nine men could operate Wapping’s three-unit presses, the unions insisted it had to be eighteen (as at Bouverie Street). Lest O’Neill should think the unions a walkover on this matter, he was reminded by them that ‘the Daily Telegraph’s pressroom lay idle for eight years waiting on our union’s agreement’.10 Apparently this was a source of union pride. Tony Isaacs, the SOGAT ‘Imperial Father’, did not mince his words, telling O’Neill, ‘Your initial overtures are to be likened to the back-street abortionist who not very skilfully performs his operation, removes what he thinks he should, and isn’t particularly worried about the survival of the patient.’11
How many men it took to stand round a press was far from being the only point of dispute. An engineer assistants’ union representative refused even to consider the Wapping proposals, claiming that if he so much as reported them back to his members there would be disruption at Bouverie Street. Others were determined to extract a price. There were even demands for ‘relocation money’ despite the fact that Wapping was closer to where most of the print workers lived than Bouverie Street. The main problem, though, was that the proposed move reignited the turf war between the NGA and SOGAT over whose members would do what at Wapping. O’Neill’s suggestion that demarcation should be the same as had prevailed at Bouverie Street was rejected. The NGA’s London deputy secretary wrote to Bruce Matthews, the new managing director of News International, assuring him that, unless the NGA prevailed over SOGAT’s competence in supervising machine manager positions, ‘there can be no question of the Wapping development coming on stream’.12 Management’s hopes that the first press lines would be running from Wapping by November 1983 soon proved preposterously optimistic.
By February 1984, nine months after the negotiations had begun, O’Neill had come to the conclusion that the unions ‘consider[ed] the longer they wait the more anxious the company will become’. The various union chapels raised all manner of excuses to postpone or call off further negotiations unless some other grievance of the moment at Bouverie Street had been settled on favourable terms first. Given the massive cost to News International of the Wapping plant lying idle, the temptation to concede to whatever price the unions named was tempting – as the unions perhaps calculated. The interest charges alone on the plant were running at £10 million a year.13 And, as the months rolled by, union militancy broadened and strengthened. Although there were no proposals in place to transfer the Sunday Times’s production to Wapping, the paper’s chapel officials took the pre-emptive measure of announcing they would veto any such move in the future.14
O’Neill came to the conclusion that if incentives had no effect, the only way to get movement was for the unions ‘to be frightened in some way’.15 It was not clear how this could be achieved. Rather, when it came to threatening behaviour, the unions packed a formidable punch. O’Neill’s meeting with Ted Chard from SOGAT’s London Central Branch demonstrated the improbability of reaching agreement with the union whose members ran the publishing room (where the newspapers were bundled and assembled for distribution). Chard listened carefully to what O’Neill had to say about the proposals for jobs at Wapping. When the presentation drew to a conclusion, Chard stood up and asked if he had finished. O’Neill said that he had. ‘Right,’ said Chard, ‘now I will tell you a thing or two. We are leaving here. We will not be back until you have proposals that make some sense.’16 As he stormed out, his SOGAT delegation rose and followed him out of the door. It was the end of the negotiations, although it should have come as no surprise. Shown round the pristine plant by its technical director, Ken Taylor, a senior SOGAT representative said, ‘When will you get it through your thick heads, we will never let you use it, you may as well put a match to it – or we’ll do it for you.’17
The negotiations to move to Wapping broke down irrevocably on 19 December 1984. In a parallel development, the Scottish union branches also refused to print the Sun at the new Kinning Park plant that had been built in Glasgow unless it was turned into a separate Scottish newspaper rather than one whose pages were transmitted from Bouverie Street. Thus News International had built two state-of-the-art print halls, at a cost in excess of £100 million, which they could not use because the unions refused to let their members work in them. Though the chapel fathers thought they had won a great triumph, they would savour it for only thirteen months. It was a Pyrrhic victory that would ensure only their total annihilation. As Rupert Murdoch had prophesied back in 1981, the unions would soon discover they had finally got the proprietor they deserved.
III
The most violent dispute during the 1970s had been outside the Grunwick photo developing plant in north London. There, a small picket of those at issue with the management was regularly reinforced by many thousands of other trade unionists, including the Yorkshire miners, who tried to prevent the non-striking employees from getting in to work there. Postal workers also got involved. By refusing to handle mail to the company, they hoped to strangle it into submission. The scenes – many of them ugly – helped to persuade the incoming Conservative Government to prevent such sympathy action. The 1980 Employment Act made ‘secondary action’ (by those not directly employed by the company in a dispute) illegal. A further Employment Act in 1982 curtailed unions’ legal immunity. Henceforth, they could be held financially liable for breaching the law. Guilt might result in a fine or being subject to injunctions to freeze assets until any contempt of court was purged. The definition of secondary action was tightened further, to include making it illegal to refuse to handle – to black in the parlance – products produced by non-union workforces. Further measures followed with the 1984 Trade Union Act which sought to make unions more transparent and accountable to their members. Legal immunity was removed if unions failed to hold secret ballots prior to calling a strike.
On paper, this was a formidable body of legislation but whether it was operable remained to be seen. SOGAT’s National Executive Council wrote to News International’s managing director to disabuse him of any thought that the 1982 Act could be deployed, adding that the union wished ‘to state emphatically that we are prepared to utilize all the resources of this society in resisting any implementation of the proposed “Act”.’ Furthermore, they demanded a carte blanche assurance that News International would not initiate legal action. The letter concluded, somewhat threateningly, ‘we rely on your good sense in co-operating with us’.18 In line with TUC policy, SOGAT also announced that its members would not cooperate or participate in any ballots on the ‘closed shop’ arranged under the provisions of the 1982 Act.19 Put simply, the union did not intend to recognize the law.
In July 1983, a dispute between the NGA and Eddy Shah’s Messenger Newspaper Group based in Warrington became the litmus test of whether the trade union legislation was enforceable. Shah wanted to end the closed shop and recruit non-union
labour. In response, the NGA tried to prevent production of his papers and wrote to advertisers requesting them to withdraw their advertisements. NGA members brought production at the Daily Mirror to a standstill, forcing its owner, Reed International, to sell its 49 per cent shareholding in the Messenger Group. Although this sort of secondary action was illegal, the NUJ joined the assault, mandating its members not to provide the Messenger Group with any copy.
Fined £50,000 for contempt of court for persisting with secondary picketing, the NGA’s response was to refuse to pay up. An all-out siege of Shah’s Warrington plant was organized. The fine was increased to £100,000 and the union’s assets sequestrated. NGA members in London took revenge by striking on 25 November, shutting down all the national newspapers for the following day. The main attack on Shah’s print works came on the night of 29 November from a mob of four thousand ‘pickets’. Buildings were set on fire, the police lines broken and the gates repeatedly rammed (employees were on the other side of them trying to prop them up against the blows). Shah was trapped inside, fearing for his life. The situation was only saved by the timely arrival of the riot police. In Fleet Street, Shah’s greatest supporter was the young and outspoken new editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil. Never one to let deferential niceties get in the way of his principles, Neil took it upon himself to place a post-midnight telephone call to the Home Secretary warning of the dire consequences of letting the mob incinerate Shah. Neil’s reward was a shutdown at his own paper when the unions refused to print the 4 December edition unless the leader column’s supportive comments towards Shah were toned down. Neil refused to be intimidated by these tactics. When the unions restarted the presses what followed that evening was a suspiciously high number of paper breaks and lost production.20
But the tide was turning. Eventually, in January 1984 the NGA agreed to operate within the law having lost more than £2 million of its £10 million assets in fines and fees. Eddy Shah had won. A minor proprietor of regional free sheets had taken on a national print union on principles for which no Fleet Street proprietor had been prepared to risk all. But the implications would stretch far beyond Warrington. Three important lessons had been learned. First, by legally separating his subsidiary organizations into independent companies, Shah had been able to get court injunctions against ‘secondary action’. Secondly, the police could be counted upon to help break an illegal siege of a print works. Third, the TUC might donate some financial aid (it gave the NGA £420,000) but it would not organize cross-union resistance.21
These lessons were not lost on Bruce Matthews, the straight-talking Australian who Murdoch had brought in as News International’s managing director. In January 1985, Matthews made the journey over to Murdoch’s house in Old Chatham, upstate New York, and outlined a scheme to switch all four of News International’s major newspapers to Wapping and ditch the existing NGA and SOGAT workforce in the process. It was a seemingly fantastical proposition. Matthews had met Tom Rice, the EETPU (electricians’ union) national secretary, and was impressed by the way his union had run a Finnish-owned paper mill in Wales after SOGAT had made unreasonable demands. Matthews proposed that EETPU members could operate Wapping. Ultimately, the EETPU would want recognition with sole bargaining rights but initially would be happy just to see its members employed without formal recognition. In one bound, News International would be rid of the NGA and SOGAT forever.
Matthews, a close follower of the Turf, was setting the stakes for an extraordinary gamble. If the NGA and SOGAT realized there were moves afoot to cut them out of working at Wapping they could call strikes at Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road that would destroy Murdoch’s media empire long before he would have the chance to get production up and running at Wapping. 1985 was a particularly bad time for Murdoch to risk catastrophe. With total debts of $2.6 billion and plans to take on more with the extension into US film and television (what was to become the Fox network), he was reliant on the revenue provided by his British newspapers – revenue that accounted for almost half of News Corp’s profits. A major shutdown would finish him. But he was intrigued by Matthews’s audacious plan. Murdoch’s modus operandi was to come to decisions quickly and then stick by his word. He needed no further persuading.
On 10 February, Murdoch summoned the key personnel he would entrust with the operation to his Fifth Avenue apartment in New York and explained to them their mission. The editors of the four papers were not brought in at this stage. However, The Times’s deputy editor, Charles Wilson, was invited. Impressed not only by his work at Gray’s Inn Road but also by his handling of the fractious journalists in his brief stint editing the Chicago Sun-Times, Murdoch had decided Wilson would fulfil a central role. Those who assembled around the table were left in no doubt about the magnitude of what was being proposed. Logistically, the operation was extremely complicated. It was not just a matter of telling a group of electricians which buttons to press. Wapping had been built to print two tabloids, the Sun and the News of the World. But the idea now was to move the broadsheets, The Times and the Sunday Times, there as well. This necessitated a change in capacity. What was more, the journalists of all four papers were to be moved to the new site too. This was the second strand of the strategy. The idea was not only to dispense with the services of the NGA and SOGAT but also, in doing so, to achieve what management had failed to win during the 1978–79 shutdown – an end to double-key stroking. Henceforth, journalists would be given the technology the unions had denied them – access to computer terminals where they could type their copy straight in without having to get an NGA compositor to do it for them. Wapping would not only be a blow against trade union militancy, it would herald the long-delayed dawn of technological freedom for journalists.
It was one thing to state the objective, but Murdoch proceeded to sketch the means of pulling off the coup. In great secrecy, the computer terminals would be tested and installed at Wapping. A cover story would be created to throw suspicious observers off the scent: it would be pretended that the plant was being set up to launch a new local newspaper, the London Post. This fictitious journal would be ‘edited’ by Charles Wilson who would go through all the motions of starting up the paper as if it was for real. He would even advertise and hire journalists for it. When the plant was finally ready to print its real product – The Times and its stable mates – the unsuspecting journalists from the existing papers would be bussed in and Gray’s Inn Road and Bouverie Street evacuated. But until that moment, it would be imperative that the journalists were told nothing about what was planned for them. If news of the plot leaked out before it was ready to ‘go live’, the unions could bring News International down. And in this eventuality, not just News International but the entire national press would remain at the whim of union activism. For those let into the secret that afternoon it was a bold and exciting plan and the prospect of success was intoxicating. Flying back to London on Concorde, Wilson and his co-conspirators made the most of an otherwise almost deserted cabin. In fact, cruising at supersonic speed above the clouds, they had a party.22
IV
In 1814, John Walter II, the son of the founder of The Times, had wanted to use a modern steam press that could do the printing of the paper far more effectively that the existing machinery. Fearing the Ludditism of his printforce, he had the steam press installed secretly and ran off the first edition without them realizing. Clearly beaten, his workforce agreed to operate the new machinery. One hundred and seventy-one years later, Walter’s successor at The Times was contemplating the same tactic although, less certain of his print workers ability to perform a tactical retreat, he would not be offering them the option of re-employment. There was also a more recent – American – precedent for what Murdoch was planning. In 1975, Katharine Graham’s Washington Post had overcome a violent nineteen-week siege by print workers hostile to the introduction of new technology. Graham had ensured new staff were trained to do the strikers’ jobs. The striking printers retaliated by setting
fire to the press room. Graham broke the siege by hiring helicopters to ferry the printing plates over the pickets’ heads. Ultimately the Post got through. Whether the British public would greet Murdoch’s attempt with the same understanding it had shown towards Kay Graham’s initiative remained to be seen. Unlike her, he was not also a benefactor of liberal causes and could more easily be painted as a bottom-line capitalist careless of his responsibilities to organized labour.
One of those who had helped do the groundwork for Kay Graham’s victory was an American-domiciled Liverpudlian, John Keating. Keating was now Murdoch’s technical director and was instrumental in advising on the installation of the Atex computer typesetting system at Wapping in a $10 million deal. With so much experience of Fleet Street’s failures, Murdoch drew on as much international talent as he could find. Christopher Pole-Carew (brought in to advise from the union busting company T. Bailey Forman) and Bill Gillespie were Englishmen, but in this respect they were in a minority. Wapping’s operational manager would be John Cowley who, like Bruce Matthews, confirmed Murdoch’s penchant for preferring tough Australians to what he frequently assumed were effete Englishmen. Charles ‘Gorbals’ Wilson was in no danger of being described as either effete or English. The upper-class Englishman Murdoch did admire, Douglas-Home, was certainly not effete. But in common with the other editors involved in the move, he did not play a leading part in the technical discussions primarily because the plan did not involve any alternation to editorial practice. Nonetheless, Douglas-Home was extremely enthusiastic about the plan and Murdoch kept him briefed on developments. As 1985 progressed, Douglas-Home was a man having to carry the burden of keeping two secrets from his close colleagues: his excitement for the Wapping project and the knowledge that he might not live long enough to see it put into operation.
The History of the Times Page 32
