It was a dispute that changed the face of an industry and set a milestone in British industrial relations. After the Government-orchestrated defeat of the miners, an equally well-prepared Rupert Murdoch took on the last remaining Praetorian guard of the labour movement, the printers. Twenty-five years on since the start of the Wapping dispute on January 24 1986, images of riot shields, batons and mounted police charging into picket lines abide.
At least two people died from injuries on the picket lines and many more were injured. Others lost their jobs, homes and their community. It was the beginning of the end for what was known as Fleet Street, and the start of a nationwide retrenchment of the rights of workers to be represented through organised trade unions.
Two years after News International pulled out of Wapping for new headquarters in Broxbourne, the 25th anniversary of the dispute marks not only the past but also the legacy it bequeathed to Rupert Murdoch, at the time owner of The Times, The Sun and the News of the World.
Profits which followed the victory over the printers and journalists were the seed corn for a subsequent global multi-media empire, culminating with the bile-driven, fact-challenged Fox News in the United States (see page 15).
It created a power to which prime ministers and president’s bowed– in Tony Blair’s case, travelling halfway round the world to pay homage at the court of Murdoch. Now Murdoch’s companies are bidding for the wholesale takeover of Sky amid fears that if it is successful the channel could go the way of Fox. The presses in Broxbourne are estimated to have the capacity to print an entire overnight run of all the UK national morning newspapers put together. But like many Murdoch ventures, even if that were the ambition, it shows no signs of materialising as owners of titles such as The Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Express have recently either built or expanded their own plants.
The Wapping dispute began with the overnight move of Murdoch’s News International group from its inner London sites to the newly-built, and fortified with razor wire Thames riverside site in Docklands. But it followed months of covert and meticulous preparation for what was to come, not least in an unprecedented array of legal tools. While NI executives played a camouflaging game of cat-and-mouse talks about Wapping, secret plans were being laid for the real project.
The move to the non-union printworks led to the sacking of more than 5,000 workers, mostly printers and about 50 “refusenik” journalists. Having denied the new plant was being built to move the existing titles but was for a mythical new “The Daily” paper, the company delivered an ultimatum that there was to be no union representation or collective action. Anyone refusing to sign a legally binding agreement to this effect within half an hour was sacked with no right of appeal.
The print workers – with stories about their lucrative “Spanish practices” played up by a hostile media – were portrayed as new Luddites, refusing to adapt to a changing world of new, more efficient technologies. But this was not the case.
“The mythology about this dispute is that it was all about new technology and the refusal of the print unions to co-operate”, says Tony Burke, a print worker and executive council member of what was then the National Graphical Association. “There was general acceptance that there was going to be some change. That was never in dispute. It was about Rupert Murdoch’s desire to break organised trade unions and representation at the new Wapping plant.”
He says Murdoch had the advantage of a “perfect storm” – new technology, a rogue union in the electricians’ EETPU which provided a substitute workforce, a raft of anti-union industrial laws, the recent abolition of the closed shop law and a sympathetic Conservative Government.
In the year-long dispute, the High Court sequestrated the funds and assets – including its officials’ cars – of the largest union, Sogat, as the company attempted to shut it down. Other unions suffered heavy fines for
“secondary action”. Laws restricting picketing exclusively to a company in dispute were difficult not to break, since Murdoch had set up so many shell companies behind which the real company was hidden. Sacked workers were told they could only picket – with a maximum of up to six people at a time – outside their registered place of work. For the majority that meant offices and works in Gray’s Inn Road, more than three miles away near King’s Cross, and Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, both empty buildings.
For the first time lorries, owned by the TNT fleet, were brought in to deliver papers to distribution houses. Until then, the bulk of newspapers went by rail. Now all go by road.
Labour councils which instructed their libraries to boycott Murdoch titles were hauled before the courts.
Demonstrations and picketing resulted in many arrests and injuries. Complaints against police brutality and unwarranted arrests resulteed in inquiries and investigations, including those by the Haldane Society of lawyers and the Northamptonshire police force.
Behind the razor wire, the company indulged in a piece of irony that any Sun sub-editor would have been proud of: instead of unions they set up a passive staff organisation called News International Staff Association, NISA. It wasn’t, especially on the other side of the wire.
Ann Field, then a national officer of Sogat, recalls that the mounted police arrived about three to four weeks into the dispute, the riot police followed two or three weeks later and that “lots of people were injured”.
She says: “We knew at the time that this dispute had huge significance. People lost their community, their homes, their family structures. People’s lives were just bulldozed through and there is enormous bitterness
even now.”
Steve Sibbald, who was then a national official with the NGA, recalls other companies around the country following in News International’s wake and derecognising unions. The electricians’ union, although it provided the “gangster trade unionism” to ensure Murdoch’s victory, never won a single new member. It and all the other print unions are now amalgamated into Unite.
“It was all about power and breaking the unions”, says Ann Field. “It is all about power still and that is why the lessons of Wapping are still important today.”
The National Union of Journalists, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom are hosting a meeting to mark the News International dispute on Tuesday January 25, 7-9pm, St Bride’s Institute, London EC4.
