[Journalists on the 'Daily Mirror' have been sacked…]
Socialist Press1977 1977-11-23Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 10 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 10
Journalists on the 'Daily Mirror' have been sacked by their management after they refused to drop their pay claim.
The sackings are to be followed by a similar move against Sunday Mirror, Sunday People and Reveille NUJ members on Thursday. Altogether about 250 journalists are involved.
The move has been made under the watchful eyes of Fleet Street employers whose Newspaper Publishers Association no longer negotiates centrally with the NUJ.
'Hot weather'
Instead each national newspaper group concludes house deals with local chapels which has allowed both sides to ride a coach and horses through pay policy in agreements which have never been detailed.
Mirror journalists were paid hot weather' money during the summer of 1976 to avoid open confrontation over pay.
Now the claim has been forced to confrontation. The £3,000 rise quoted is only for a lew of the members working 'on the stone' with punters who will be using new technology.
But the increases across the board are too big for the employer to swallow in any form.
Their offer-of up to £1,500- has not been enough to stop a dispute where mandatory meetings held by NUJ members at critical moments have lost 18.5 million copies of the paper in London. Manchester (which negotiates separately) is unaffected.
The strength of the claim is undoubted, but NUJ members under professionally devious leadership are trying every twist and turn they know to avoid a straight pay claim, straight forwardly fought.
In moving to sacking the IPC owned newspaper has Clearly calculated that a strike will test the ability of this leadership to function in the open. JUJ members must change that leadership if it tails the test.