Pergamon NUJ chapel lives to fight another day

Scan page 13

Pirket of Headington Hall offices by Pergamon strikers MORE THAN six months ago journalists at Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press headquarters in Oxford walked out on what they hoped would be a short strike over wages and conditions.

This Monday they returned to work for the first time since March 4. They were in new offices four miles down the roac and almost none of their original demands had been met.

Yet the nine NUJ members who returned to the unfamiliar task of editing journals this week have won an outstanding victory. The full might of the Maxwell empire, bent on removing them from the company, has been pushed back.

Against almost overwhelming odds, a small group of workers has beaten off a determined attempt to wipe out the only active union at the hub of what has now become & giant multi-national web of publishing companies.

The strike which began on March 4 1981 came after 18 months of fruitless attempts to negotiate a new house agreement.

Wages at Pergamon were (and are) at the bottom of the list of publishing wages and other agreements were being changed for the worse day by day. For example there was (and is) no proper sick pay agreement.

No decisions Although Maxwell was in the middle of negotiating to buy the British Printing Corporation, he insisted that no decisions could be taken by anyone but him.

This style of management is now being felt in BPC itself, where directors find that they have become errand boys for Maxwell's At Blackpool to lobby the TU every whim. In the case of Pergamon it meant that most of the meetings which had been set up were rancaller at. the. last minute.

But there was more than that to Maxwell's obstruction. He was determined to confront and break the union. Within the past two years there have been two short strikes by the editorial staff at Pergamon, both over dismissals.

In both cases the sacked members were reinstated after strikés which had lasted three days and one The Oxford NUJ branch had meanwhile written : DOTA to AsiMo and to tne Labour Party, asking how it was possible for Maxwell to claim he was a member of the labour movement). • (He was recruited to ASTMS personally by Clive Jenkins and he is a member of the GC of Oxford City Labour Party GC).

Maxwell regarded those actions as ' 'interference' He launched fierce attacks on the NUJ chapel, demanding that it dissociate itself from the Oxford branch, and blaming the chapel officers, Jim Boumelha and Simon Collings, for attacks which threatened his convenient divide between public and ' personal! life:

This distinction was later also to be made by the ASTMS National Executive, which said that Maxwell could not be disciplined, because he had not been acting in his capacity as a trade unionist when he sacked the NUJ members!

Several attempts had been sponsored by MaxPatrick Spilling reports on the victory of a long and hard well's hired hands to overturn the chapel leadership. At one point Maxwell's son became a member of the NUJ chapel. All such efforts had failed. But by running down the staffing on the journals department and by threatening junior managers that they must choose between future promotion of the union, Maxwell managed to reduce numbers in the chapel.

Sacked

Within two days of the strike starting Maxwell had sacked all nine NUJ members. Although the chapel continued to dèmand reinstatement and the meeting of the house agreement claim, from this point the number one issue at stake became whether the chapel would survive.

The NUJ is not the only union at Headington Hill Hall, in Oxford. APEX has a branch there, which has been used in the past by Maxwell to claim that the NUJ could not recruit in certain areas.

But out of a huge potential membership APEX has been reduced to a couple of dozen members, only half a dozen of whom are at all active. It proved virtually impossible throughout the strike even to get APEX to meet; only on one day did one of their officers refuse to cross the picket line.

The NGA also has a chapel at : Pergamon although not a closed shop. The NUJ chapel had held from? By walking, of course, probably using the semi-upright knucklewalking that modern "JJseveral discussions with NGA before the strike started and were convinced that they would get swift support.

Many of the problems being faced by the NUJ were also being faced by NGA members, who were also crippled by having among their leadership Ken Hall, a long time collaborator with Maxwell. During the strike Hall was elected as Oxford branch president.

But hopes of support were dashed, if slowly. For some time the NGA chapel maintained it was waiting for instructions from head office in Bedford.

Officials at national level claimed that the chapel didn't want to support -and there was one of those long drawn out shuttles between the members on the ground and the National Council of the NGA in which that union seems to specialise.

Support

The NUJ chapel, the Oxford NUJ branch, and the Oxford Trades Council, had set up a local support committee which built for a number of demonstrations on the gate and which helped to organise picketing and lobbies of key national meetings.

Both the NUJ chapel and the support committee were consistently in favour of placing demands on the print union leadership to oppose Maxwell. There was * Maxwell's sunce al plan, for BPC involved thousands of redundancies in SOGAT and the NGA. One print plant after another was closed down with the workers complaining bitterly that a deal had been signed over their heads.

Although the struggle at Pergamon was not over redundancies, it was important that the print unions be forced to say where they stood when a fight did break out.

When a strike against Maxwell did take place -at Park Royal - the chapel quickly made contact and tried to show the common thread running through the disputes.

Gradually the chapel built contacts inside the new Maxwell empire and began to press for national action to win the dispute. The emergency committee of the NUJ was pressed to call for national blacking.

Chapel members went on tour around the country drumming up support. Everywhere they went they found a widespread hatred to Maxwell. A Scottish tour raised several thousand pounds. Mass demonstrations outside the gates won the support of trade union branches not seen in public for years.

Maxwell's own ASTMS branch condemned his action and asked for an and gorillas only need to spend a short party of the day looking for their food and spend the rest of the time playing.

Our direct ancestors, however, were not to be seduced by easy living and instead stuck to the difficult task of developing language, agriculture, industry, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, nuclear weapons and possibly even socialism.

Competition: A new logo for SO science. Ist prize "Einstein for beginners" last prize "Healey's Eye" Hurry your entries in now! Judgement will be by an impartial panel of labour movement activists.

But the emergency committee began hedging over action. National blacking would mean stopping major publications, like the colour magazines of the Observer and the Sunday Times.

'Deportation'

Out of the blue, talks were set up with Maxwell. He offered six members their jobs back - and 'deportation' for the other three, to jobs in France, Scotland, and Australia. These were for the two chapel officers plus Carol Russell, who had become MoC of the group chapel.

This deal was recommended by the union president, Harry Conroy, but rejected unanimously by the chapel.

During the TUC, the chapel sent a delegation to Blackpool to lobby the NUd delegation. T'hey in turn set up a meeting with the NGA and eventually the NGA agreed that if Maxwell did not agree to go to ACAS they would call out their members at Oxford.

The final set of negotiations - with a repentant Conroy now really fighting for the jobs - lasted until the early hours of the morning. Maxwell eventually conceded all the jobs back at Wheatley, where he is moving part of his journals production; and the chapel accepted. Talks are now taking place on the house agreement.

Determination

The significance for the labour movement is that even a small number of union members with determination and a consistent orientation towards forcing the union leadership to act can defend itgelf.

It is not a victory in terms of wages and conditions. But despite the odds, the chapel is still there. It can rebuild its forces. It can. fight again on wages and conditions.

Maxwell