Jim Brookshaw was Father of the Chapel (convenor) for the AUEW engineers at Times Newspapers when Rupert Murdoch abruptly moved the production of all his titles from ‘Fleet Street’ to Wapping on 24th January 1986. 25 years later, he looks back at this important struggle between unions and bosses.


The newspapers involved were The Times, The Sunday Times, The Times supplements, The Sun and The News of the World.  The two engineers’ chapels (workplace branches) from Grays Inn Road and Bouverie Street immediately formed a joint organisation.

When General Horrocks addressed his officers before the Arnhem battle in 1944 he told them that this was something they would be able to tell their grandchildren about.  “And,” he said, “Mightily bored they will be!”  I have sometimes noticed the eyes of my grandchildren glaze over when I am banging on about the Wapping strike.  After all it did take place before any of them were born.  Before writing these words I thought about how a young person today who was interested might find information about the strike.  As I am nearly up to date, I knew!  I Googled ‘Wapping Strike’!

Hooray for Wikipedia but here you find some correct things but mostly mistakes, lies and distortion.   It says that after protracted negotiations the 6,000 workers went on strike and then Murdoch moved his titles to Wapping and sacked the strikers.  The only thing correct here is the number 6,000.  There had been no serious negotiations but only ultimatums from management.  The strike began after the titles were moved without warning.  In fact when I was asking for talks about a possible move, senior management at The Times told me that there were no plans to move the papers to Wapping.  In the same week, one of the supplements was the first thing to be printed in Wapping.  That triggered the strike which was followed by the 6,000 being sacked and the moving of all the titles.

Presses

Historically newspapers were journals commenting on events well after they had occurred.  With the development of new types of printing presses and the Linotype machine, it became possible to report news.  There began a competition between papers to be first with the news.  The owners wanted to get the papers out as quickly as possible.  For that you need a number of presses and a large workforce for a period of time.  For example, with one press and fifty workers you might get the paper out by 10 am. Then with four presses and two hundred workers you could get it out by 5am.  As many workers were taken on as were needed to get the paper out in the shortest possible time.  Once the paper was out the workers could finish.  The bosses came to resent this and tried from time to time to change things but they had no success. This is the origin of the myth of ‘Spanish customs’.

With the development of offset litho printing and later of phototypesetting and computer technology it became possible to envisage a new way of producing papers.  Letterpress printing as used on all newspapers came to be denigrated as old fashioned ‘hot metal’ printing.  Hot metal (a molten mixture of lead and tin) was used in two ways.  Firstly the paper was composed by the use of characters made from hot metal in Linotype machines.  Then a mould was made from this and hot metal used to make a curved plate which then went onto the press. ‘New technology’ was supposed to do away with this and according to Murdoch and the other newspaper magnates, ‘modernise’ printing.

Technology

It was estimated in the 70’s that with new technology everything printed in Britain could be printed with half the labour.  Some of you may be old enough to remember being told that we faced a future of not knowing what to do with our leisure time!  Two things were possible.  Either we could all work a 20 hour week or half of us could carry on with a 40 hour week and the rest could have the sack.  You can probably guess which of these two options appealed to the press barons. The story told by the bosses was that we printers would not accept ‘modern’ ways of working or ‘modern technology’.  What they meant was that we were not prepared to give up union representation and relatively good wages and conditions built up over decades.

The only thing ‘new’ and ‘modern’ about the boss’s proposals was that we should work longer hours, lose jobs and have worse conditions. The so-called ‘new’ presses that went into Wapping were built in 1971 and were letterpress machines just like those in Fleet Street.  The new thing was fitting polymer plates instead of metal ones.  This ‘new’ method was already under way at The Times.  Its introduction together with computer typesetting had already been agreed by the chapels.  There was no ‘hot metal’ typesetting at The Times. The Linotypes had gone and hot metal on the presses was set to go.  These changes had taken place with no loss of jobs - and there’s the rub!  That’s not what the bosses had in mind.

The anti trade union laws of the Thatcher government which had defeated the miners were now used against us.  It is just a simple fact that making effective picketing illegal was Thatcher’s gift to the bosses.  When my job was taken to Wapping and given to a scab I was perfectly free to picket the empty building in Grays Inn Road.  The minute I set foot outside the Wapping plant I was breaking the law.  When we tried to stop the blacklegs, we were pushed, shoved, beaten and arrested by an army of uniformed thugs.

 
Our fellow workers in Fleet Street were of great support in terms of financial help and solidarity.  They made it possible for us to be without wages for twelve months.  They supported us in their thousands on demonstrations to the plant. There was a boycott campaign.  We had some successes with picketing scab depots and in other ways!

Support 

I believed then and do now that we could have won the dispute despite the anti-union laws.  Other print workers supported us because they knew that if we were beaten they would be next.  We were beaten and they were next!  Right at the beginning I proposed that we call for a 24-hour Fleet Street strike.  This was to be used as a warning to the employers and to prepare to mobilise for an all-out national print strike.  My fellow workers were persuaded that this was madness and rejected.  It was however the only thing that would have got the job done. 

As a result of the weakness of our union leaders and the scab betrayal of the leaders of the electrical union (EEPTU) not only did we lose, but so did the rest of Fleet Street. After a year on strike we were battered by a police riot.  They had clearly been told to “lay it on with a will”.  But we were determined to carry on.  Suddenly in the first week of February the leaders of the print unions called the strike off.  We engineers gathered as usual at St Brides to decide what to do.  We were less than 200 and felt high and dry.  We decide by a majority vote to end the dispute.  We were able to get a promise that blacklisting had been removed from three of our members, although as I discovered later there was still a battle to be had on this issue.

Now in the face of this arrogant ConDem government our leaders are looking for an easy way out.  Be serious. This is yet another attempt to make working people pay for the boss’s crisis.  Like the miners in 1984 and the printers in 1986, if the Labour and trade union leadership lifted their little finger the bosses can be stopped in their tracks.