43

This article considers the experience of press workers in the newspaper

industry in Britain to examine how workers can rebuild their collective
organisations to resist and supplant the increasing prevalence of non-
unionism. Taking the press workers at Wapping firstly and then
press workers in general, the re-composition of the labour process is
considered to show that new spaces and opportunities for worker
resistance are continually provided even within inhospitable
environments. As such workers’ power is socially constructed and
mobilised rather than technologically determined.

Resisting the Rise of Non-unionism:

the Case of the Press Workers in the
Newspaper Industry
by Gregor Gall

T HE CONTEMPORARY DECLINE of collective industrial

relations and trade unionism in Britain has been well
documented, notwithstanding the continuing debate
about the actual extent of this and the prospects and methods for
reversing the decline. One aspect of this decline has been the
relative growth of non-unionism as a conscious alternative
employer strategy for organising the employment relationship
(Millward et al 1992, Marginson et al 1993). Non-unionism and
union derecognition have been shown to embody not the practices
and techniques of human resource management (HRM) but a
kind of ‘bleak house’ or ‘black hole’ of ‘no industrial relations and
no HRM’ (Guest 1995, Sisson 1993). These Dickensian ‘bleak
houses’ are characterised as comprising fewer disciplinary
procedures, fewer health and safety representatives and fewer
channels of organised information and consultation, compared
to unionised workplaces. Flowing from this there are higher levels
of dismissals, compulsory redundancies, labour turnover and
industrial accidents and a greater preponderance of low pay and
company-performance related pay than unionised workplaces
(Millward et al 1992, Millward 1994).1 The strategy of the ‘bleak
house’ employer is not union avoidance-cum-substitution
44 Capital & Class #64

through forms of paternalism, direct communication and

alternative means of representation but avoidance through
market-level only wages and conditions allied to coercion and
intimidation of the workforce through management practice
and the unrestricted force of the labour market and job insecurity.
This article examines the case of the newspaper industry in
Britain as an example of this increasingly non-union ‘bleak
house’ scenario where an employers’ offensive over the last
decade has resulted in the widespread derecognition of trade
unions and a decimation of their collective power. The article then
examines how workers in the industry can rebuild their collective
power to meet the challenges from the employers.
Traditionally, most research on the industrial relations of
the newspaper industry has concentrated on the pre-press (i.e.
composition) and production areas and its workers organised by
the National Graphical Association (NGA) and Society of
Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) (eg. Gennard 1987, 1990,
Gennard and Dunn 1983, Martin 1981 and Preece 1987).
However more recent research has focused almost exclusively on
journalists and the editorial area (Gall 1992, 1993, 1995, Noon
1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, Smith and Morton 1990, 1992). This
has been largely the result of the obvious changes taking place in
the industry. Following the removal of the compositors and
their union organisation through the use of new technology,
the journalists and their union assumed a new importance
because the technology allows them to intervene in the production
process in a far more forceful way than previously, to the extent
that they can now stop production. As a consequence of this
new found potential within a context of the drive to cut costs and
increase the rate of accumulation, the journalists have experienced
one of the largest waves of union derecognition in Britain (Gall
1993, Gall and McKay 1994).
In this context no attention has been paid to the position of the
other groups of the ‘traditional’ workforce who remain in
employment in the industry after the huge changes in technology.
This article examines the position of a specific section of print
workers, the press workers, and considers whether such a
historically powerful group of workers can collectively resist
and supplant an extended and deepened managerial prerogative.2
Such an examination considers the theme of not just union
resistance but also that of re-building union power as a result of
the opportunities provided to them by changes in the technology
Resisting non-unionism 45

and organisation of newspaper printing. Thus the thesis of ‘union

renewal’ (Fairbrother 1989, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 1996) is given
some consideration. News International’s east London Wapping
newspaper printing plant is used as an exemplar to allow an
examination of the processes of the diminution of collective
power and the attempts to rebuild it in a hostile environment.
The structure of the article is as follows. Firstly the historical
context of the press workers is considered to inform an
understanding of their present position. Then an examination of
the case of the press workers at Wapping leads to an assessment
of the potential for collective resistance on the part of press
workers in Britain in general. Finally an analysis is put forward of
the difficult but not infertile ground for rebuilding union power
in the industry.

The historical context of the press workers

Historically skilled or craft print workers are recognised as one

of the most powerful and well-organised group of workers within
modern capitalist society, notwithstanding their weaknesses
such as sectionalism and inter-union disunity. Traditionally
they have been characterised as being industrially militant but
politically conservative. The print workers’ control of the
workplace arose from strict divisions of labour, acts of solidarity
like ‘blacking’ of work from non-union shops, and control of the
labour supply. In the period prior to the demise of Fleet Street as
the main centre of newspaper production in the mid- to late-1980s
in Britain, various writers (Gennard 1987, 1990, Gennard and
Bain 1995, Gennard and Dunn 1983, Littleton 1992, Martin
1981, Melvern 1986) have shown how the print workers,
particularly the skilled workers in the NGA had, on balance,
successfully resisted managerial initiatives in terms of the
introduction of available (new) technologies, the terms on which
the technology would be introduced and their implications for
work organisation and work practices. These printers became,
along with the miners, dock workers and television technicians,
the betes noires of Thatcherite management.
Following the decisive defeat of the print unions at Wapping
in 1986-87, both national and provincial newspaper employers
took the opportunity to remove the print workers’ collective
organisation from their workplaces.3 The newspaper employers
46 Capital & Class #64

took advantage of a specific juncture where it had been

demonstrated that determined and well resourced employer
opposition to the print unions’ strategy of limited mobilisation
of resistance would (often with the help of union collusion)
allow them to re-assert their managerial prerogative. The wider
environment, which was conducive to this project, was one of
continuing union strike defeats and hostile employment laws.
Specifically the employers were able to introduce new labour-
saving technologies and by the early 1990s all the major national
and provincial newspapers had made redundant the majority of
the print workers who carried out typesetting and composition,
re-deploying those remaining on inferior wages and conditions
without union recognition. For example pay rates were reduced,
the working week lengthened and holidays curtailed. This
particular trajectory was the result of the way the employers
consciously and deliberately chose to introduce the new editorial
technology which was designed to make redundant the need for
second-keying. In so doing the employers removed any
foreseeable obstacles to their strategy of decollectivisation in the
non-editorial production process.
The point is that it was not new technology itself which
resulted in the redundancy of the compositors and disorganisa-
tion of the print workers’ collective organisation. An alternative
outcome could have been the relocation and reconfiguration of
the workers and their collective organisation as a result of
managements guided by pluralist rather than unitarist
perspectives and/or stronger and more effective trade union
mobilisations of membership power. Those who now carry out
these pre-press production tasks under direct input are mainly
young, often female, low-paid, non-union and short-term
contract workers. Although in these areas of the production
process workers are technically capable of disrupting production
because they are not readily substitutable, for their skills take at
least six months to be learnt, they are unlikely to realise or
exercise this potential power because they remain unorganised.
For this reason the consensus, whether hostile or sympathetic, is
that print union organisation and power in the newspaper
industry is a spent force (eg. Gennard 1990, Gennard and Bain
1995, Oram 1987).
However, consideration of these issues has ignored one
section of labour that, despite all the technological change, work
reorganisation and union retrenchment, remain not only
Resisting non-unionism 47

collectively organised but have enormous potential power to

halt production to either protect or advance their wages and
conditions. This section of labour runs the presses and as the craft
machine workers they are referred to hereafter as the press
workers. This area of production has witnessed substantial
technological change, but technological change which (under
the control of management) has not dislodged this group of
workers. It is the recent experience of this section of labour
firstly at News International’s Wapping plant, and subsequently
in other printing plants in the rest of the newspaper industry
which is used to examine the construction and mobilisation of
employer power and the attempt to construct a bulwark to it. The
context for this with regard to the press workers is a contradictory
one. On the one hand there exist hostile unitarist managements
intent upon increasing the level of labour exploitation, and a
generally hostile political environment, a generally depressed
and sullen workforce in the industry with low levels of self-
confidence and self-organisation. Yet on the other hand there
exists the need and desire to resist managerial diktats, the
maintenance of collective organisation and consciousness and an
enhanced strategic power to stop production. The article now
proceeds to consider the case of the press workers at Wapping.

The post-1986 industrial relations of Wapping

The 1986-7 year-long dispute was not concerned with new

technology per se but rather the conditions on which that new
technology would be introduced; the removal of the closed shop,
complete labour flexibility and a no-strike deal.4 Crucial to the
defeat of the NGA and SOGAT was the company’s ability to
continue production and distribution of newspapers with an
alternative workforce to run the presses. This alternative printing
workforce was organised through the electricians’ union’s (the
EETPU) Southampton office (Hammond 1992: 73-115). The
EETPU sought to use the Wapping plant to establish a bridgehead
in the print industry outside their traditional sphere of recruitment
in the industry. By providing a workforce, which they sought to
recruit, the EETPU hoped to expand their membership base
from electricians and maintenance workers to press workers.
The wider ambition behind this project was to provide a bulwark
against the left-led print unions, particularly the NGA, who the
48 Capital & Class #64

EETPU regarded as stifling the industry by enforcing unrealistic

demands and preventing the achievement of mutuality and
partnership between employers and employees (Hammond
1992: 76-78, 113).
Despite the crucial role the union played, and repeated
attempts to gain full recognition including collective bargaining
(Hammond 1992), the company refused to grant any form of
union recognition to the EETPU. In the absence of wider
mobilisation of union power, the year long picketing and lobbying
of this alternative workforce by sacked print workers and their
supporters in the labour movement made no discernible impact
in persuading these workers to withdraw their labour to help
win the re-instatement of the 5,500 sacked workers and their
demands. These replacement workers, and their union, were
the opprobrium of the labour movement and were not regarded
as being capable of remaining anything but ‘lackeys of Murdoch’.
Nonetheless, the workforce inside Wapping has not proven to be
completely subservient to the needs and interests of News
International. The Wapping press workers have sought to resist
the ‘bleak house’ scenario. This can be demonstrated by
considering a number of issues.
In 1987 the press workers, through their staff council, sought
a significant pay increase, new training procedures, an employee
share ownership scheme, a holiday bonus and talks over hours
because of the labour cost savings that News International were
making at Wapping compared to Fleet Street. Despite a ballot
rejecting their offer, the company imposed a 6% wage increase
and refused to negotiate on any of the issues the staff council
raised. Following this, the chair of the staff council resigned,
alleging that the EETPU was more interested in representing
the employers rather than employees. The chair of the staff
council and others at the plant concluded that the workers
needed either a more assertive EETPU or the services of another,
more independent union. He stated:

[The management] don’t listen at all. We were told there would

be discussions not confrontation. But there proved to be a very
strong pyramid of control in management. The strings were
pulled from the top down. (The Guardian, 4/9/87)

The Guardian (ibid) reported ‘disillusionment with manage-

ment and bitterness about the electricians union’s inability to
Resisting non-unionism 49

stand up to the company.’ Subsequently the staff council organ-

ised a ballot which showed that workers favoured representation
by another union (321 votes) over representation by the staff
council (239 votes) or by the EETPU (140 votes) (Littleton 1992:
149). Despite this, the company refused to recognise another
union and victimised members of the staff council (ibid: 150). It
then abolished the staff council because (according to News
International) ‘it [had] becom[e] a hindrance, not a help, to
good staff relations’ (The Independent, 8/12/87).
At the same time the company paid, in return for employees
signing a no-strike contract, a 20% pay increase over three years,
bringing most salaries to around £22,000 p.a. and provided a
sports centre, pension scheme and better private health scheme.
The staff council was to be replaced by a new ‘open door’
approachable style of management, using quality circles which
could be used to table grievances and make representations to
management. Despite the acceptance of the package by some 84%
of the workforce, a vocal minority continued to demand
representation by another union, saying that they felt ‘highly
vulnerable [and] resent[ed] their dependence on News
International’ (Financial Times, 17/12/87).
Despite non-recognition, between 180-200 of the workforce
joined the EETPU in the first couple of years (Financial Times,
8/10/87, Hammond 1992: 89). This number was to have risen to
over 530 but the EETPU was obliged to turn down some 330
applications under the TUC’s instructions during its mediation of
the inter-union dispute. Although the TUC was to be the main
conduit for unionisation at Wapping (Financial Times, 8/12//87),
no concerted effort was made by the TUC on its own or with the
print unions to organise the workforce. The undertaking of this
task may have been made somewhat easier by some 400 former
NGA and SOGAT members working at Wapping (Hammond
1992: 89) rather than being young ‘green’ workers. Following
the EETPU’s expulsion from the TUC, which freed the union
from its obligation to the ‘Bridlington rules’, and the petition by
700 workers for the EETPU to organise a recruitment, its
membership had risen to 330 by early 1989 and then to 400 by
mid-1989 (Hammond 1992: 112) of out some 850 workers.
By 1991 one of the original strike-breakers claimed ‘It’s worse
now than when the pickets were there. It’s like a prison camp. In
the first few months we got what we wanted but now you just have
to do what they say, that’s the problem (The Independent 20/5/91).
50 Capital & Class #64

Even Eric Hammond (1992: 80), the EETPU’s then general

secretary, stated that ‘Murdoch’s way of going about things has
resulted in a workforce at Wapping with little pride and
considerable fear of its management’.
Matters were brought to a head by May 1991 with the
implementation of 134 redundancies (around a quarter of the
press hall workforce) and the imposition of a five-day week or
nine-day fortnight from a four day week increased the working
week from thirty-four to sixty hours. This meant spending more
time travelling to and then staying in London because the press
workers lived in the Southampton area. The very conditions
which made the job attractive to them in 1986 had now been
significantly eroded and this led to, for the first time, significant
industrial unrest.
Until 1991, News International’s huge and relatively easily
made profits, as a result of its domination of the British national
newspaper market, were used to finance the expansion of
Murdoch’s global company, News Corporation. However in
1991 in response to News Corporation’s growing financial crisis
as profits fell at a time of huge debt repayment, News International
was required to increase its profits even further to bail out
Murdoch. Thus News International sought to intensify and
extensify the exploitation of labour in the press hall. To
compensate for the changes the company offered a 7% pay rise,
bringing the minimum earnings of a press worker to £27,000.
Initially the press workers worked a go-slow and work-to-rule
which delayed the production of the Sun and Times by an hour
and a half every night. Following this EETPU members pressed
their union, after holding a mass meeting of some 300 workers,
to hold a ballot on industrial action. The result of the ballot was
a rejection of strike action but a 6:1 vote for industrial action short
of a strike. The company refused to back down and by early
June the threat of industrial action had receded as the workers felt
powerless to change the company’s position in the face of their
intransigence.
Another episode in the post-1986 history of industrial relations
at Wapping is revealing. The ‘In House Committee’ was set up as
the forum to air workplace grievances (after the abolition of the
staff council) but it was subsequently abolished in 1989 after
some of its members used it to present a pay demand. In its
place the ‘Human Resources Committee’ was established which
was now put under tighter control than its predecessor. In the
Resisting non-unionism 51

period 1990-91 two press workers began to openly recruit to

SOGAT as they believed that this union would be more effective
in representing their interests than the EETPU. Their ability to
recruit to SOGAT had only become an option following the
decision by the SOGAT Biennial Delegate Conference in 1990 to
recruit Wapping workers. They recruited around a hundred
members. During this period of recruiting one of these workers
stood for election to the ‘Human Resources Committee’. When
the company realised the activities of this worker, he was harassed
for poor time-keeping but continued to canvass for support for
the election and to recruit to SOGAT. When he contacted the
Electoral Reform Society for the result of the election, he was told
that he could not receive notification of the result and that his
votes had not been counted as the company had informed them
that he no longer worked at Wapping. Following this the Electoral
Reform Society recounted the election voting papers and found
that this worker had won by a clear majority. However two
weeks later this worker and the other worker recruiting to SOGAT
were dismissed. The company was subsequently found to have
implemented ‘unfair dismissal’ against these two workers. They
were not re-instated but awarded compensation of around
£20,000. Another staff representative was also ‘paid’ to leave
(Hammond 1992: 115).
It seems clear that after the danger of industrial unrest in 1986
had passed, News International, driven by its desire to increase
profitability, was intent upon treating this relatively privileged
group of workers in a similar authoritarian and exploitative
fashion to that experienced by the sacked workers. News
International has displayed not the characteristics of the ‘good’
non-union employer (Guest and Hoque 1994) offering higher than
average (for the labour market) wages and conditions with HRM-
type policies of individualism, high commitment and involvement
as a deliberate union substitution strategy but those of the ‘ugly’
non-union employer; deliberately manipulative and exploitative,
providing poor working conditions and few rights. In sum News
International is an example of the ‘bleak house’ employer. While
News International may have used the rhetoric and form of
HRM-practices, there appeared to be little intrinsic commitment
to HRM as a conscious strategy for organising the wage-effort
bargain: rather their initiatives and responses suggest a prevalence
of opportunism. Thus News International could also be classified
as an exploitative ‘traditionalist’ employer rather than an
52 Capital & Class #64

‘sophisticated paternalist’ (Sisson 1989). The authoritarianism

practised necessarily led the company to treat the press workers
as a collective body, not as individuals, because it viewed them as
a ‘commodity’ rather than as a ‘resource’ and one which had to be
managed through forms of ‘direct control’ rather than ‘responsible
autonomy’ (Friedman 1977) . The company headed off and
frustrated attempts to collectively organise the discontent through
coercion and intimidation as a result of this policy. That the
company succeeded in facing down not insignificant opposition
from a strategic group of workers without making any key
concessions is testament to their confrontational style of well-
resourced management (Smith and Morton 1993: 101) and the
weakness of the different forms of collective organisation available
to the workers.
Despite the containment of the industrial action in 1991, the
press workers (and other News International workers) continue
to resist management’s unilateralism. In 1993 all staff and workers,
organised through their unions, rejected a profit related pay
increase funded through tax avoidance and forced the company
to pay a larger than offered pay rise. In 1994-95 after the sacking
of a sub-editor on Today for arranging a meeting with colleagues
over problems with office furniture and computer facilities, a
joint-union recruitment and recognition campaign was launched
which has produced some limited results in terms of new recruits
and union activity. Subsequent to this, in 1997, News International
established Employee Consultative Councils to which staff were
able to submit wage claims. While this represents an advance in
that it conceded the right to consultation, it is not through a
union forum. Moreover it is being used as a bulwark to prevent
further union activity and the unions being able to benefit from
proposed enabling legislation on union recognition.

The press workers at Wapping and ‘union renewal’

Fairbrother (1989, 1990, 1994a, 1994b, 1996) argues that

workplace trade unionism can be re-vitalised and re-structured
to meet the challenges its members face in the current hostile
environment. He (1989: 3,4,6) writes:

[U]nion renewal is about the way unions reorganise and

recompose themselves to meet the problems of work and
employment. …it is in the workplace that unions organise,
Resisting non-unionism 53

sustain and renew themselves. …any move towards union

renewal must and will come from the bottom up.

Union renewal, being both possible in both the private and

public sector, is about trying to avoid the tendencies within
trade unionism towards accommodation, separation, routinisation
and conservatism in order to meet the challenges from the
employers. This overall process he (1994b: 101, 1996: 111) argues
is neither easy, straightforward nor uncontested (by management
or union officials). In particular Fairbrother (1989: 25-6) argues
that the necessary ‘pre-requisites’ for union renewal are leadership
turnover, membership participation, membership education
and overcoming sectionalism.
The case of the press workers at Wapping provides an example
of union renewal, but one which was slow, complicated, often
contradictory, cautious, uneven and partial. After the decimation
of the previous collective organisation of Fleet Street, the press
workers grappled with the problem of how to confront managerial
prerogative in a number of different ways, based around changing
views of whether and how they should make use of the available
compromised and constrained form of trade unionism (the
EETPU), the management initiated form of representation (the
staff council) or the traditional form of trade unionism (SOGAT).
Although the press workers were unable to secure union
recognition and formal and regularised collective bargaining,
they did manage to prevent derecognition leading to de-
unionisation and the forms of unionism they adopted could not
be classified as ‘business unionism’ (Bassett 1986, Kelly 1996,
McIlroy 1988). In this they were helped by News International
treating them collectively rather than as individuals so that the
experience of discontent was a generalisable and uniform one.
From these bases they were able to mount not inconsiderable, if
ultimately unsuccessful, resistance to News International. Just as
importantly their resistance and re-organisation show the
possibilities for rebuilding union power to provide heightened and
more successful resistance.

Developments in the rest of the newspaper industry

While we cannot point to other examples of the deep-seated

and long-standing resistance found at Wapping in the rest of the
newspaper industry by other press workers, we can nonetheless
54 Capital & Class #64

show that such resistance is possible. This arises from a number

of factors. Press workers in the rest of the industry have
experienced in much the same way a diminution of their terms
and conditions of employment as well as union derecognition.
Nonetheless the environment for rebuilding union power to
counter these changes is not entirely infertile.
Firstly the changing technological and organisational nature
of the industry provides opportunities. Newspaper printing,
and in particular the press area of newspaper production, has seen
several important recent changes. Machinery for printing
newspapers has become far more expensive and capital-intensive
because the machinery is now technologically much more
advanced and versatile in terms of capability for regional
editionising, inserting (leaflet adverts and supplements), capacity,
speed of printing and colour. For example, in 1993 Portsmouth
and Sunderland Newspapers purchased a new press for their
Portsmouth facility costing £21m. The investment in such
expensive machinery places a premium on profitability and debt
repayment.
Moreover newspaper printing, reflecting this cost and facilitated
by the electronic transmission of typeset, has now become more
geographically concentrated as companies have centralised their
facilities. There are several dimensions to this. Some national
groups have ceased to have their own production facilities and have
contracted out to companies which already print other group’s
papers. Alternatively they have formed joint ventures with other
newspaper groups while some provincial groups have built new
printing plants to bid for national newspaper contracts in addition
to the printing of their own newspapers.
Thus, in the national press West Ferry Printers (Isle of Dogs,
London) print the Financial Times, Express and Telegraph
groups’ papers for the south of England, while Trafford Park
Printers (Manchester) print The Guardian and Telegraph for
the north of England and Scotland as well as the daily Manchester
Evening News. News International prints its papers at Wapping
in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, while the Mirror/Independent
group prints its papers in London, Manchester and Glasgow.
Express Printers (Manchester) print the northern copies of the
Express group newspapers as well as David Sullivan’s Sport
newspapers. Contracts to print Associated Newspapers’ papers
and the Financial Times in the north vary from Leeds, Sunderland
and Stoke depending on which provincial newspaper company
Resisting non-unionism 55

holds the contract. In the provincial press there are some examples
of similar concentration; United Provincial Newspapers’ Martland
Mill plant in Wigan prints three of its northern daily provincial
newspapers, all its weekly newspapers (numbering around 10)
and free newspapers as well as doing contract printing, while
EMAP has concentrated printing from three sites into one in
southern England and Westminster Press’s new plant in York
prints its two daily papers based in York and Darlington.
Therefore, in a national context a marked tendency towards the
concentration of production has taken place over the last decade.
Lastly, in terms of significant recent developments, in the
shake-out of labour relations in the industry in late 1980s and early
1990s, what the employers regarded as ‘over-staffing’ was stripped
out by the companies in the press area. Management have not just
eliminated ‘over-staffing’ but pushed levels down so low as to
make workers over-stretched and stressed as a result. Two
implications flow from these changes. Firstly, the levels of skill and
competence for operating such machinery at optimum speed
and printing quality are fairly high, even though such machinery
is computer controlled. Human skill is still required to operate
these machines where such problems as breakages of newspaper
rolls and the non-alignment of inks for colour printing lead to
down-time, missed deadlines and wastage. Production times to
meet delivery times are extremely inflexible: lost production
time is equivalent to lost sales where newspapers must reach the
new-stands by a certain time to maximise sales—clearly
yesterday’s news cannot be resold. Secondly, the number of
skilled workers required to run such machinery is now relatively
small, but the number remains sufficiently large that supervisors
and overseers would not, without some difficulty, be able to
efficiently run the presses to the required quality and quantity
should the normal workers be unavailable. This was highlighted
by periods when several press workers were absent at the same
time for reasons of sickness and ill-health.5 These points have
recently been accentuated by a sixty per cent increase in the cost
of newspaper print in 1995 and the rise in the debilitating intra-
and inter-media competition.
In sum these technological and organisational changes mean
that the production process is a very fragile one where such a
strategically placed group of workers in this process can exercise
a disproportionate amount of power. The exercise of such a
potential may be enhanced by another factor, the merger of the
56 Capital & Class #64

NGA and SOGAT to form the GPMU in 1991. As a result of

this, press workers are now potentially a more united and more
powerful force because companies are less able to practice ‘divide
and rule’ tactics.6 It is in this light of this potential that we can
understand the following events. The Telegraph group, publishers
of the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, decided to derecognise the
GPMU when it was formed and the Independent group at the
same time refused to recognise the GPMU despite a high level of
unionisation. In the provincial press, reported cases exist where
the reinvigoration and renewed activity of union organisation
after merger resulted in the victimisation and sacking of GPMU
shop stewards. One such case occurred at Northcliffe Newspapers’
(owned by the Daily Mail) Derby Evening Telegraph where the
derecognised chapel was organising to regain recognition while
in Scotland in 1995 when the Daily Record in Glasgow transferred
production to a new out of town greenfield site, three long
standing and senior union lay officials were dismissed, they
allege unfairly, because of their trade union activities.

The social construction of collective power among press

workers

Despite the process of technological and organisational change

and the removal of strongholds of workplace unionism, it has
been argued that a certain group of almost forgotten workers, the
press workers, retain the potential power to halt the production
process to press their demands in order to resist the non-union
‘bleak house’ scenario of poor working conditions and few
workers’ rights. Indeed it was suggested that this ability has
actually increased as a result of the recomposition and
reconstitution of the production process. Furthermore despite the
sharp and far-reaching shift in the balance of power towards
the employers in the industry, the press workers remain
collectively organised and thus have the potential capability to
exercise this power in order to halt the production process.
These two factors (ability and capability to stop production)
remain critical to the process of rebuilding union power to resist
the non-union employer. Without them the press workers would
be unable to exert any substantive pressure upon their employers
when seeking to either prevent or ameliorate employer initiatives,
or forcefully put forward their own demands and proposals.
Resisting non-unionism 57

However it is clear that the capability of the press workers to

exercise this power through collective organisation has been
undermined (or steps taken to prevent its re-construction) as a
result of strategies and policies implemented by the employers to
disorganise union bodies and power. These policies at Wapping
and other printing plants have not been the gamut of ‘new
management techniques’ or HRM but simple old-fashioned
authoritarianism, management by fear and unilateralism. An
NGA official claimed (prior to 1991) at Wapping that:

There are people who are being pushed out for all sorts of
reasons, some of them grossly unfair, under management’s right
to manage. They may be picked on, put through disciplinary
procedures and out. So it’s going to be interesting to see how that
forms in our favour. … The degree to which this unsettles people
is going to be quite interesting. (quoted in Littleton 1992: 157)

This shows that there is a considerable potential, even if this

is neither automatic, uncontested nor inevitable, for the anger and
discontent to take a collective organisational form which can
then be mobilised to effectively and successfully resist and
supplant managerial initiative and gain trade union demands. The
alternative would be to take individualised paths, i.e. leaving,
to deal with the problems workers face.
This suggests that the construction and mobilisation of trade
union (and employer) power is a social process, and one which
is not determined in a mechanistic or straightforward manner.
Hobsbawn (1964: 170) has argued that:

Labour-saving … and … simplifying devices do not …

automatically dislodge key groups of workers from their
strongholds. They do so only when such groups are unable to
maintain their relative indispensability (i.e.their bargaining
strength) during the crucial transition period, and cannot
‘capture’ the new devices for recognised unionism, the standard
rate and standard working conditions.

That the press workers remain collectively organised is because

of on the one hand their traditions of collectivism and on the other
hand their perception of the need to act collectively to protect their
wages and conditions. That they have been able to sustain such
organisation is an indication of the particular type of traditions
58 Capital & Class #64

of trade unionism among printers, namely its strength and

cohesion in the face of management hostility. Nevertheless
because we have only been able to talk of the potential usage of
this power to stop production apart from the case of Wapping
rather than the actual exercise of this power, it can be deduced that
the overall state of the existing union organisation in press halls
is not healthy and that the level of confidence to take effective
industrial action is fairly low. This results from the effects of the
generalised demoralisation and disillusionment affecting workers
in the industry, the employer policies designed to disorganise
trade unionism, and the Conservative employment laws (Smith
and Morton 1993, 1994). Thus the attitudes that ‘we are lucky to
have jobs and shouldn’t do anything do jeopardise them’ and
‘effective industrial action has been outlawed’ expressed by the
press workers whom I interviewed tempered, if not dominated,
the desire to take any collective industrial action to defend or
advance their wages and conditions in the current period.

Concluding Remarks

The starting point for this article was the use of the ‘bleak house’
scenario to characterise the working environment facing the press
workers. In the newspaper industry this would, superficially, seem
to indicate the triumph of employer and the decimation of worker
collectivism. However the situation for trade unionists and socialists
is far from hopeless if we recognise that the balance of workplace
(class) forces and the frontier of control are not technologically but
socially constructed and determined in a complex and
contradictory way. Thus there are continually both spaces and
opportunities for workers’ collective resistance to the imperatives
of capital. As a result the conditions for re-building union power
can arise in the circumstances of technological and organisational
change. For example, despite widespread redundancies, the foci of
the strategic points of production are altered and re-cast. Often,
relatively small numbers of workers as a result of their collective
organisation and strategic position in the production process can
wield a disproportionate amount of power.
These conditions, albeit particular in a number of respects to
the newspaper, produced, for example, a partial and contested
form of union renewal at Wapping. The paradox is that while the
managerial strategy of non-union challenges the interests of
union members, they can also re-affirm the need for collectivism
Resisting non-unionism 59

because of employer hostility (eg. see Gall 1995). Furthermore,

these managerial challenges may then be the stimulus to both the
re-invigoration of union organisation and the exercise of union
power (in the form of industrial action, for example). As a
consequence, this may further consolidate and solidify the basis
and health of the union organisation in terms of various indices
of member commitment and participation. Thus trade unionists
and socialists should not become despondent about the prospects
for the revival and re-invigoration of workplace trade unionism
even where the initial struggle against the detrimental effects of
new technology proves to be ineffectual. Workplace unionism,
even though subject to crushing blows in terms of morale,
confidence and organisation, can be subsequently re-established
and re-invigorated.
______________________________

Thanks are due to the help of anonymous referees in re- Acknowledgment

drafting this article.
______________________________

1. The location of HRM practices is in fact often amongst unionised Notes

organisations where such practices are used to try to marginalise rather than
exclude trade unionism (Storey 1992).
2. The material for this article is derived from research carried out for a doctoral
thesis on the changing employment relationship in the newspaper sector in
the early 1990s which concentrated primarily on the position of the journalists.
However this research also focused on the wider changes in the employment
relationship in the newspaper industry in order to locate and understand the
position of the journalists within this. It is from this material that the paper
is drawn. The material was collected by conducting face-to-face semi-
structured interviews with managers of the newspaper companies and
officers of the NGA/GPMU. The author also previously worked as a pre-
press worker on a daily provincial newspaper in north-east Scotland, making
up (manually) the pages. This work allowed the observation of the various
facets of the production process and interviews with the production workers.
3. The defeat at Wapping added to the anti-union momentum created by their
earlier defeats at Warrington (1983), Wolverhampton and Kent (1984/5).
4. For the best available account of the dispute see Bain (1998). This account
clearly shows how the dispute could have arrived at a different, more
favourable outcome.
5. This was apparent at production centres in Aberdeen, Sheffield and Manchester.
6. However this potential should not be overstated for the merger of two
unions with distinct ‘cultures’ and rivalries between themselves requires that
a considerable period of time is needed until full integration of the two at the
branch and workplace levels is achieved.
60 Capital & Class #64

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