Darlington: a Crisis of

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Strikers at Darlington returned to work on January 16 united but defeated. Their 32 week strike for a closed shop was broken despite their determination and the backing of a highly principled chapel of NUJ members at the London office of their employers, Westminster Press. The National Executive of the NUJ has set up a committee to examine the strike and the future of the closed shop policy. NUJ member Peter McIntyre examines the lessons to be learned.

Darlington was not simply the NUJ's longest ever strike. It contained within it a distillation of the problems, confusion, strengths and weaknesses that have confounded the journalists'" union • Over the past decade.

The eight month strike for a closed shop by 106 journalists in Darlington and Durhäm epitomised the limits of trade union militancy and posed in a classic form the crisis of leadership facing the working class.

Starting from a straightforward trade union demand, the strike brought to a head the evident refusal of print union leaders to lead any fight bigger than a skirmish against the employers. brought them into a conspiracy with the employers and ACAS against the NUJ membership and print union supporters and it exposed the weakness and vacillation of the militants on the NUJ Executive.

Demand

Closed shops have been official NUJ policy for more than 40 years. The demand has occupied the centre of the stage for NUJ members over the past five years, largely through the growth of the management sponsored Institute of Journalists: and through the campaign waged by the newspaper owners over the Bill introduced after the return of the Labour Government to scrap the Industrial Relations Act.

Few managements were more prominent in this campaign than Westminster Press-the owners of the Northern Echo and other Darlington and Durham newspapers.

When the NUJ struck for three days in 1973 for the right to put in local claims, Westminster Press circulated members of the NUJ who were moving into the bottom rungs of management and made them an offer it judged they could hardly refuse.

Guarantees

If they chose to work through the strike the management would guarantee that they would not lose out by any union action taken against them afterwards.

Many of the most servile elements opted for a future of secure promotion by leaving the union.

Overnight the advocates of cowardice and surrender turned into men and women of principle fighting for their right to remain outside the NUJ.

The IOJ became a safety net. At one and the same time it was a registered trade union which might give the illusion of shelter, and an organisation so deferential to management that membership would be no barrier to promotion.

It was against this background that journalists on the Northern Echo, the Evening Dispatch, the Durham Advertiser series of weeklies and the Darlington and Stockton Times, declared a post entry closed shop in the summer of 1976.

Management signed nothing but after a accept the position and gave a verbal assurance that the policy would not be broken.

But if the local North of England newspapers favoured collaboration, their bosses on the board of Westminster Press in London were not so concilatory. The Northern Echo is one of the few morning papers outside the big centres of Fleet Street, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.

If the precious star of the Westminster Press empire could establish a closed shop which could combat the low wages, what hope was there to resist throughout the chain of provincial papers up and down the country?

In April 1977 the firm hired Josephine Kirk-Smithan anti union fanatic-as a sub editor on the Echo and the chapel was on course for a strike.

It started on June 3 1977 after print union leaders had succeeded in stalling it off for one week.

The bureaucracies of the NUJ and the print unions differ in an important way. The NGA, NATSOPA, SOGAT and SLADE have decades of established bureaucratic control.

The authority of the leadership has become a crippling barrier to any autonomy by the membership.

Resolution

When the Westminster Press NGA group chapel passed a resolution expressing support for the spreading of the Darlington strike, the executive ignored it. Officially the group chapel did not exist in the union structure.

The NUJ by contrastthough beset with leaders as capable of betrayal as the print unions-is not anywhere near so heavily bureacratised.

Membership The problem then for the print leaders was that the NUJ membership did not have the same subjugation to bureaucracy that they have come to expect outside Fleet Street from • their own members.

When Bill Keys, general secretary of SOGAT and head of the Printing Industries Committee of the TUC, heard that the national executive of the NUJ had refused to accept his sell-out. he demPHOTO:

anded angrily to know when they would grow up.

If that expresses the contempt that Keys has for principle, then the fact that the NUJ stand lasted just one week demonstrates how weak and vacillating was the opposition.

Social Democrat The local leadership at Darlington was a strike committee which contained individuals close to the SWP and to the Communist Party.

But the Father of the Chapel (FoC), Mike Duggan, is a social democrat who had been elected immediately before the management assault on the chapel's closed shop declaration.

Throughout the dispute Duggan and the other local leaders held the membership united in a way which is unprecedented in a long NUJ dispute.

But Duggan and his strike committee remained wedded firmly to the concept of a successful local action. Formally the Darlington chapel supported a call from the Westminster Press Group Chapel (representing all papers in the group) to escalate the strike throughout the group. In reality Duggan was frightened that any extension of the strike would sabotage the unity of the chapel.

For the same reason he was unable to confront the print union leadership in a direct way. The strike committee insisted that these leaders musI 'antaelements within the NGA Executive (in fact the Executive is composed entirely of right wingers and Stalinists) were determined that the strike would be won.

For this reason lobbies of the PIC were called off or watered down and the chapel agreed to cancel a mass picket in Darlington for fear of offending Bill Keys.

The unity of the chapel, therefore expressed both the strengths and weakness. The weakness was that no alternative leadership able to confront these questions emerged.

When the strike began in June the printers continued to cross the picket lines. A series of mass pickets were called in which NUJ members were arrested by the dozen as scab drivers were piloted through the pickets by police.

Print union leaders began Joe Wade After stalling off support for a month with hopeless talks with the employers, the Printing Industries Committee finally sanctioned supporting action by Darlington printers from the beginning of August and North of England Newspapers stopped publication.

NUJ members in Westminster Press head office in London had been on strike since the beginning of the Darlington dispute.

Members there, faced with the choice of strike breaking by having their copy wired to Darlington or being locked out, struck.

Joe Wade interviewed outside a PIC meeting by TV declared belligerently that if Westminster Press did not give way, the whole group would be- shut down At the same time as Wade was threatening to shut down the group, he was allowing members at London to continue to scab on the London members' much more difficult strike without lifting a finger to stop it. 'In every war there are casualties? was his cynical reply to NUJ protests.

By August it was clear that support had built up in most major offices for an escalation which, with print union support, would have overwhelmed Westminster Press resistance.

To survive with a cluster papers shut down was painful but bearable. To have every major evening and weekly paper in the group closed would have been too much even for WP's fat reserves.

Critics i of the policy of escalation have said that it could not guarantee success and that the NUJ could not afford to risk escalation without a guarantee of print support.

That entirely evades the question. The safe 'united' approach was guaranteed to fail and everyone knew it.

Escalation

The only way to win was by escalation, and since the print union leaderships were determined to stop this happening, the escalation could only come from the NUJ alone-linked to a fight to get printers out alongside afterwards.

Many print chapels had expressed support and the NGA Group Chapel had also expressed support.

The Executives of the print union instructed them to work normally.

There is no question but that the workers in Westminster Press had and have the organised strength to bring the employer to its knees. The only question was of leadership willing to take the only road that could lead there.

No attempt to remove such a well established bureaucratic block can be guaranteed success in advance. It can however be guaranteed to fail if no attempt is made.

At the TUC in September, print leaders met with Morgan, the employers and Jim Mortimer of ACAS in secret. The outcome was a proposal to demolish the strike by sending it to ACAS with the strikers back at work.

Seeing the main danger as being the return to work both the Darlington and London chapels voted to accept arbitration in principle with no return to work.

One vote A Group Chapel leaflet Yes to Talks, No to Compromise handed out to NEC members said:

"To compromise on the basic principles is a policy of despair which is not present in the chapels. The aim of the NEC must be to win these disputes"

By one vote the NEC took its most militant position during the entire strike and supported these demands.

One week later this stand was ended. Under threat from Wade and Keys it climbed down. became clear that his manoeuvre had not succeeded. But although the PIC had pulled out (and NATSOPA members went back to work) both the NGA and SLADE aware that ACAS had offered nothing to the strikers could not see an easy way to sell a return to work to their members.

Stalled off

Spreading the strikes was stalled off from week to week. Chapels ready to come out began to get demoralised. For a period of six weeks they remained on the verge of one of the biggest strikes ever to be fought against a major employer.

When that strike did not begin the steam inevitably began to go out of the By allowing the dispute to go to ACAS the chapels had avoided the immediate danger of a return to work.

But, once ACAS had become involved, print union leaders- with co-operation from first Ken Morgan, and then his successor Ken Ashton-were able to prevent the strike spreading.

ACAS was not a tactical question. It was one of principle.

Excluded

Three months later more talks followed between NGA, NUJ, SLADE leaders and the employers, and for the first time chapel representatives were excluded.

The ACAS plan was trotted out again and put back to the chapel and was again rejected.

But this time Wade declared that the plan had been a joint union/management initiative and that his members would return to work.

Despite Ken Ashton's protests that he had only helped word the plan, not agreed it, the printers went back supporting the same sell-out they had already rejected once.

turnout On the very day that this was decided the NUJ Execu tive called for escalation.

The result was not surprising. A mass turnout at a Group Chapel meeting rejected escalation two weeks before Christmas with the guarantee of NGA scabbing.

It took eight months for the leadership to bring Darlington members to the point where they returned to work and not much less than that to break the resolve of other journalists in London and potential support all over the country.

The need for a leadership based on a revolutionary understanding of the nature of bureaucracy and the way to confront it was raised in the sharpest possible way throughout the strike.

In other groups closed shops were being conceded without a fight. It is not the demand that the NUJ Executive needs to look at.

It is the building of a leadership prepared to tackle the real questions raised by it.

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IST PRESS, Wednesday 25 January, 1978 IJASTRIAL MENS unwick diversion:

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