From Socialist Worker, No. 125, 5 June 1969, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Printworkers must break down old inter-union divisions and unite as bosses look to the regions for cheaper labour to solve their problems |
THE PROTEST march against anti-trade union legislation in London on May 1st was predominantly a printers’ march.
At least nine-tenths of the workers on the march came from Fleet Street and the neighbouring newspaper streets and the roll call of the organisations represented sounded like newsboys’ patter.
Print and clerical workers from almost all the national newspapers were demonstrating in vast numbers for the first time since the 1930s.
To some extent this represented no more than loyalty to the strike calls of branches and chapels. Yet the enthusiasm of the response was due mainly to the profound unease which Fleet Street workers feel about their future.
The complacency and confidence of the last 15 years have vanished. “Jobbing” opportunities, big “killings” in overtime and part time work are now difficult to come by. And there has been a sharp increase in the panic jumping around from house to house which prefaces newspaper closures.
The reason for all this is written in the profit figures for the five vast companies which control 90 per cent of the nation’s press. This year, the press, together with most other industries, will show a handsome profit (for this incidentally, they can thank the government which, in a desperate and futile attempt to “win” the press to Labour, decided that newspapers were a manufacturing industry and as such were eligible for SET refund).
But the apparently huge profits disguise a more crucial development. The rate of profits increase is nothing like as high as the rate of increase in turnover or in capital investment.
As the big combines produce more and more pap to titillate and bewilder the public, they find that they cannot show the return on profit which they regarded as their “right” in the fine, fat days of the 1950s.
In fat years, the proprietors are prepared to maintain lossmaking newspapers to soak up some of their tax liability and to meet some of the overheads of the more profitable papers.
But in the lean years, when competition ripens, they will close their loss-makers down. The closure habit is catching, and the newspapers close down like falling dominoes.
At the top of this rickety structure is the Sun, whose circulation still drops, though losses have been cut by drastic “reorganisation”, accepted by the unions.
The Sun is produced and printed with the People, in profitable property in Long Acre. The IPC bosses would dearly like to close the Sun, move the People to other presses and sell the property to cover the Sun’s losses for the last five years.
Unhappily for Hugh Cudlipp and co. there are at present no other presses available for the People, so the Sun may teeter on for a few more months.
But Mr. Robert Maxwell’s offer to “buy” the Sun may offer the IPC a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their cross.
Maxwell, incidentally, wants to run a Labour paper, and therefore, logically, he plans
to sack a third of the work force and enter into an “arrangement” with the trade unions to cut wages, raise hours and lower standards under threat of total closure.
The Daily Mail and the Daily Sketch, both owned by Lord Rothermere’s Associated Newspapers, are both making losses.
Associated Newspapers, of course, make a fat profit, but this comes from their other assets, which include several profitable docks and wharves in the Port of London.
In the other combines one profitable newspaper subsidises another which is much less profitable. In all these cases, rationalisation of a drastic nature is being seriously discussed.
In Beaverbrook’s Express, there is talk of closing down the London Evening Standard building, merging the production process of both papers and “reorganising” hundreds out of their jobs.
Lord Thomson, as soon as his commitments to print the Observer in Printing House Square and the Guardian at Grays Inn Road are fulfilled, plans to move the Times into
Thomson House and establish what he once called “a cool climate” for the Observer and the Guardian.
Such moves and climates will not take place without a vigorous effort by Thomson to save some of his investment costs by redundancy and cuts in bonuses on the shop floor.
But behind all these obvious dangers looms the threat of “regionalisation”. Two years ago, the Daily Mirror started printing a separate edition in Belfast on web-offset, with splashes of colour.
The edition has been a glorious success for the bosses. Daily circulation, which extends to parts of Scotland and Eire, is in the region of 750,000. More important, the labour costs compared with a similar effort in England are absurdly small, for the simple reason that less workers are employed for less money.
Regionalisation means setting up 15 or 20 operations similar to Belfast in England and Scotland and introducing mass cuts in labour costs in each new regional centre.
The added advantage for the bosses of such regionalisation is the big potential in local advertising which is denied the national papers. As the regional editions of the nationals soak up the local advertising, there will be a
series of closures of local daily papers, some of which, notably the Glasgow Herald and the Northern Echo, are already unprofitable.
But the real advantage for the bosses lies in the hope that they will once and for all escape the firm grip in which the print unions have held them for the last 15 years. Newspaper profits are singularly susceptible to unofficial strike action and in the fat years the bosses have been happier to satisfy demands rather than confront the unions.
Such "generosity" is ebbing. And although the bosses are terrified of the huge investment and the class confrontation involved, “regionalisation” will occupy more and more of their advance plans.
The danger for the print workers is that they will meet this challenge on the defensive, with compromises “taking into account” the profitability of this paper or that, or the rate of unemployment in different regions, or the maintenance of craft traditions
Union sectarianism is a real and particular threat in the printing industry where the National Graphical Association boasts control of the machines in almost all the major newspapers and the
Society of Graphical and Allied Trades boasts the strength of greater numbers and where both unions are easily sidetracked into inter-union squabbles.
By contrast, the success of the Liaison Committee at Odhams, where the Sun and People are printed, in countering the traditional animosity between maintenance trades show how much can be achieved by worker cooperation.
If the print workers are to avoid serious defeats and redundancies in the near future they will have to organise now to turn the fight outwards against the bosses:
Sean Geraghty, who writes in his personal capacity, is secretary of Odhams Press Liaison Committee. Paul Foot is a member of the National Union of Journalists.
Last updated on 13 January 2021