Stop Print Sackings- Open the Books

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Fleet Street printworkers on a joint union-management set of proposals for job-slashing rationalisation and new technology may be shelved or even dropped.

Huge resistance to the plans has emerged from the few meetings that have so far taken place. A meeting of delegates from the National Graphical Association (NGA) voted not only to reject the proposals but to demand that NGA General Secretary Joe Wade withdraw from the Joint Standing Committee of employers and union leaders which negotiated the scheme. Only one delegate out of 300 voted support for the plans.

A meeting of NATSOPA (National Society • of Operative Printers, Graphical and Media Personnel) delegates also rejected the scheme, while at meetings of SOGAT and NUJ officials, strong doubts were expressed though no vote was taken.

This increasing mood of resistance underlies the wage struggles in Fleet Street that have hit the headlines over the Christmas period. Printworkers are responding to the massive threats to their jobs contained in these plans by attempting to reassert the dominant power of their trade unions.

The proposals - published atter lengthy collaboration between union bureaucrats and management by the TUC Printing Industries Committee - outline a strategy for the axeing of some 7,000 out of 35,000 print jobs in Fieet Street, the introduction of new technology and a conscious attempt to prevent industrial disputes.

The deal is recommended to their members by leaders of all the print unions with the exception of the 17,000 strong SLADE, which alone took a principled line and boycotted the talks - being faced with the prospect of extinction as a union if the new technology is introduced throughout the print The employers, of course, have their horizons set much wider than Fleet Street itself.

productive forces. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essențially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideai personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers -proletarians. The capitalistic relationship is not done away with." (Marx-Engels Selected Works p428)

But nationalisation carried out in the manner of the Labour government cannot in itself solve the crisis facing capitalism.

Engels points out that it merely brings that crisis to a head, because the basic contradiction of capitalism is antagonism between the increasing socialisation of production (of which the nationalised industries are the highest form under capitalism) and the individual appropriation of the wealth produced.

This can only be resolved society taking over the means of production and distribution:

They see that if they can undermine this citadel of the power of the print unions, then they can rapidly move in on a national level to impose similar measures in local newspapers and other spheres of printing and publishing, in a bid to drive up the rate of profit in the industry as a whole.

For this reason the cash settlements the employers are prepared to offer to secure a peaceful road to redundancy among Fleet Street workers seem comparatively generous.

They know only too well of course, that any print worker who walked quietly out of a job in Fleet Street would find it almost impossible to find alternative employment in the industry.

But they stress that there will be "no compulsory redundancy"

providing the deal as a whole is accepted.

As far as the union general secretaries are concerned, they have been stampeded into deep-going collaboration with the employers because they see no other answer to the publishers' repeated threats of closure and enforced sackings.

It is one of the most deliberately open 'secrets' that only five of the 17 national daily and Sunday papers made a profit last year.

And since every union bureaucrat agrees that he has a responSibility to preserve the profits of the employer - under the illusion that this in turn preserves jobs -the print union secretaries decided to embark on joint action with the employers and recommend the deal because:

..rejection of it would result in titles continuing to fail as newspaper economics forced them out of business. The inevitable consequences would be compulsory redundancy with little or no advance warning to workers and unions."

The package as a result embodies both complete subservience to "newspaper economics" and "advance warning" of massive sackings.

The Financial Times pointed out clearly that for the union leaders the key issue was at no point the defence of the jobs of their members - this was abandoned from the start. Instead they conceneffect denying the right of individuals to appropriate the product of social labour.

But it is a task that the reformist leaders of the Labour government are unable and unwilling to undertake.

This task falls to the working class lead by a revolutionary Marxist leadership.

Crucial to the mobilisation of the working class for this task is the fight taken - up by Marxists for workers control through the demands of the Transitional Programme, in particular the demands to open the books of employers claiming bankruptcy to elected trade union committees, and the occupation of factories threatened with closure.

The struggle around these demands must go hand in hand with the demand that the government nationalise bankrupt firms, not in the old way, but without compensation to the old owners who have proved that they are unfit to own such firms, and under the management of the workers.

New cars being transported by British Ruil The main brunt of speed up and job cutting from technology is in the production side of the industry - with computers making it possible to completely eliminate skilled workers now engaged in typesetting and photographic block-making, along with the entire paste-up stage of conventional litho printing.

But it will also have an impact on journalists, who will increasingly be called on to undertake work previously done by NGA or other union members.

The answer to this would seem obvious - a joint move by the trade Computersed page lay-out - the the industry.

unions to oppose the strategy of the employers, conducting campaign to win support for a fight to open up the books and the plans of the publishers to examination by elected union committees.

Instead of this the bureaucrats on the joint union-management committee have agreed a procedure which ensures that the union rank and file will on no account be informed of future plans - though the bureaucrats are to be given sufficient advance warning to enable them to defuse struggles.

INFORMATION

Employers are required to supply comprehensive and detailed information to the Joint Committee, including, according to the Daily Telegraph:

"returns of a company's present financial situation, sales, newsprint, ink and wages costs, staff employed in major departments and corporate plans, showing economic prospects, broad strategy, long-termi objectives, investment, financial resources and pricing and advertising policies."

None of this picture will be revealed to the workers affected -though it will, in the words of the Telegraph "occasionally be divulged to unions only on a strictly confidential basis.

So the employers choose which union officials they give information to, and how much detail they give them, making workers dependant upon these representatives for their understanding of the situation.

But not satisfied with this as a means of damping down militancy, the union bureaucrats on the joint committee also advocate a new disputes procedure, aimed at taking power from the shop floor and to print jobs ELECTED tion of production, publication or distribution, agree that in the event of any difference arising which cannot immediately be resolved, continuity of the full business operation is to be safeguarded, and, wherever necessary, practices or agreements existing prior to the difference shall continue to operate pending a settlement or until the agreed procedure has been exhausted ...there shall be no stoppage of work, either of a partial or general character such as a strike, lock-out, go-siow, work-to-rule, overtime ban, chapel meetings held without, permission during production hours or any other restriction, before the stages of procedure have been exhausted."

This section shows clearly that the union bureaucrats are quite prepared to hand the whole initiative on speed up and conditions to the employers by forcing workers to go through lengthy and exhausting procedures before they are allowed to answer attacks.

This is why the instinctive reaction of NGA and NATSOPA delegates in rejecting this package of proposals is absolutely correct.

It must be decisively rejected by print workers. It will save neither jobs nor wages in Fleet Street. Instead it simply opens the door to wholesale slaughter of jobs in the industry as a whole.

But in rejecting this package, printworkers must also reject its starting point - their leaders' belief that redundancies must be accepted and that their only job is to negotiate the biggest cash settlement.

The alternative way forward is to demand that the full body of information on their finances and plans that employers are so ready to give to the Joint Standing Committee be made available to elected committees of rank and file trade unionists.

On the basis of this knowledge it will be possible to take up the fight for those newspapers which run at a loss to be nationalised under the management of workers' committees.

After nationalisation, the introduction of new technology into the work-sharing without loss of pay.

Only in this way can the new technology available in the prini industry be used to benefit the working class rather than serve ar an additional attack on workers and source of private profit to the employers.

SCREAM

The press barons of Fleet Streel will doubtless scream that national isation would "prevent free speech" and restrict "access to the press"

This kind of hypocrisy is thei standard approach. Speech is only regarded as "free" if it is under the direct control of a private ownel and his agents who dictate editoria policy in the national and loca press.

Yet of course in the case of the state-owned BBC the voice of the employer just as viciously represse! the views of the working class as it the privately owned daily press There is no distinction here or grounds of ownership.

The struggle to prevent the employers monopolising the media for their own ends centres not a! such on who owns the press, but on the development of workers control through which trade union committees begin to act to end the policies of falsification and suppres sion which are so basic to the employers' propaganda.

CONTROL

The fight to defend Fleet Stree jobs against the employers' abuse of new technology will bring adyanced workers quickly to thi point of recognising the need fo such control.

But in the meantime tha struggle on jobs must begin. Wadi and the other print union leader must be dragged out of thei relationship with the bosses, an‹ confronted with the needs and demands of the membership.

The document must be throwi out in its entirety. Not one job, no a penny in Fleet Street wages mus be sacrificed to the private owners.

The militancy of Fleet Stree workers must be given politica direction as the spearhead o defence of jobs throughout thi industry. That is the only answe to the new technology.

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*WUT

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It is beginning to look as if union plans for a ballot of