up front
General Secretary Jeremy Dear says unions must challenge perverse legal rulings
A fight for the right to strike
W
hile media attention focused on British Airways’ attempts to ban strikes by cabin crew, across the hall at the High Court, Johnston Press (JP) was seeking a similar ban on strike action by hundreds of journalists. Unite’s case revolved around 11 spoilt ballot papers, from a total of more than 9,000 votes cast. BA’s challenge wasn’t over the legitimacy of the result but that just one of the many channels used to communicate the result to members didn’t detail those 11 papers. The NUJ case was even more perverse. Johnston Press, publishers of nearly 200 newspaper titles, claimed to ‘employ no journalists’. This is despite the JP stamp on pay slips; the JP company handbook that staff receive; and the JP disciplinary and health and safety policies by which staff are required to abide. So, was chief executive John Fry being economical with the truth when he told the Culture, Media and Sport select committee that ‘we have 11,000 journalists around the country and they create huge numbers of local stories’? Or is the Johnston Press website incorrect when it states the company employ 6,500 people, including 1,900 journalists. Maybe it is a printing error in the annual report that has led to the claim that the group employs 6,500 staff including journalists. Johnston Press plc closed the group-wide pension scheme; it imposed the group-wide pay freeze. Johnston Press plc has implemented
the group-wide introduction of the Atex content management system, so reviled by editorial staff. Despite this, Johnston Press maintains the fiction that decisions are made locally. Our dispute is not with local managements but with Johnston Press plc. Individual managers cannot lift the pay freeze, re-open the pension scheme, or ditch Atex. Yet the law requires us to have a dispute with each wholly owned subsidiary.
S
“
It is an assault on the fundamental right of workers to withdraw their labour
”
poilt ballots, a web of subsidiary companies, it doesn’t actually matter. The anti-trade union laws, introduced under Thatcher with the pretence of ‘giving the unions back to their members’, provide more than enough scope for employers to derail the democratic wishes of any group of workers. These and other recent High Court injunctions are a de facto ban on the right to strike. Unite’s Tony Woodley, summed it up: “It is now all but impossible to take legally-protected strike action against any employer who wishes to seek an injunction on even the most trivial grounds.” Unite went on to overturn their High Court ban which is great news. But the genie is out of the bottle as far as the blatent bias of anti-trade union laws. We will take our case up with the European Court of Human Rights. It is also an issue the TUC must act on urgently. The threat of sequestration precludes any single union defying similar nonsensical judgements in the future. The TUC now has a crucial role to play in co-ordinating a trade union movement response. As for our members at Johnston Press, this judgement solves not one of the crucial issues in the dispute. They will re-ballot, this time 40-plus individual (but identical) disputes along with their Scottish colleagues who, outraged at management tactics, have now asked to be balloted too. We must support them and the right of all workers to withdraw their labour.
For all the latest updates from the General Secretary visit his blog at: http://jeremydear.blogspot.com theJournalist | 9
511_JOURNALIST_MAY_P09.indd 3
24/5/10 17:21:21