Journalists throw out pay diversion lodge 30% claim

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It such espou unior vocifi BOWE retur The National Union of Journalists is to put in a claim for a 30% pay increase an extra week's holiday and a massive cut in the working week for provincial journalists.

. Chapel representatives decided on the claim at Birmingham on Saturday after rejecting a move by the union's leadership to abandon a centralised claim.

This policy was put forward as supposedly taking a "principled stand" over the Nottingham journalists sacked during last winter's seven week pay strike.

"Unprincipled"

Members of the Provincial Journalists Industrial Council and full time official Mike Bower argued that since the Newspaper." Society had not forced the employers, T. Bailey Forman, to reinstate the sacked NUJ members it would be "unprincipled" to negotiate with them.

In practice this policy could do nothing whatsoever to assist the sacked Nottingham journalists, while it would effectively abandon the pay demands of thousands of provincial journalists in smaller offices to the charity of their employers at local level.

Fake Lefts was little wonder that Based by the fake lefts in the and was backed most erously by those-including er-who had argued for a n tó work last year with . the Nottingham members still sacked, and who ridicule the correct demand for strike action.

Hostility to these fakes was widespread: one delegate correctly accused Bower of "mealy mouthed hypocrisy' In drawing up the claim, delegates decisively rejected a demand tabled by Oxford Mail and Times journalists for full defence of wages against inflation with NUJ committees to compile a cost of living index.

But many motions called for the wage claim to include an amount to offset inflation, and the 30% figure itself had vague references to this effort.

It is clear that the fight waged for several years within the union for the sliding scale of wages has produced a response Streatfield, Education Comm.

a distorted form. ttee Chairman, has drawn up a But the result is a "large' series of vicious plans to meat claim which has none uniting qualities of the of the sliding years as demanded by Environ. the f3m of cuts over the next 3 scale. ment Secretary Heseltine.

The claim includes a demand for a 35 hour week inclusive of knuckles by the government for meal breaks which is in effect a imposing a supplementary rate demand for a ten hour reduction in the working week. instead of making immediate It also includes demands for cuts in this financial year, the improved maternity pay, fully Brigadier and his extreme right transferable pensions and the wing cronies anxious to prove their loyalty to Tory ideo abolition of indentures.

For the second year running logy by driving all mothers of the FOCs embraced the ludi- under fives back into the home crous call for an 'independent' inquiry into the wages; one delegate backing the call summed up its content by nursery schools and 16 nurser making the remarkable state- classes, they plan to axe grant ment: "If we really want a to playgroups, adventure play decent wage increase we've got to be prepared to stand up and schemes. wait for it."!

face the chop, one of thes last year following the 6 wor

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