Reposted from CPGB-ML
The news that newspaper proprietor Eddy Shah had died at the age of 81 did not make headline news, notwithstanding the obituaries sections. Indeed, the name Eddy Shah would today only have resonated with people of a certain age, given that his coming to prominence in his field occurred over 40 years ago.
But Eddy Shah, a local newspaper proprietor who owned a group of free papers in Warrington, Cheshire, brought about a revolution in the production of newspapers which not only was ruthlessly exploited by Rupert Murdoch, culminating in the Wapping dispute of 1986, but was subsequently adopted by every newspaper in the country, including the Morning Star.
It was these changes in newspaper production that opened the door to the launch of new newspaper titles, including The Independent and the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, which was notable for employing the services of Henry Kissinger as a football columnist. But, more critically, it led to the complete destruction of the print industry, the terms and conditions of the workers who toiled in the industry, and swept away decades of hard-acquired and well-rewarded skills forever.
Shah and a life in print
Eddy Shah was born Selim Jehane Shah in Cambridge on 20 January 1944 to an English mother and an Iranian father. He was raised in the main by his grandparents in India, but was sent to a private school in Scotland and, after being suspended on two occasions, completed his secondary education in Sussex.
Shah’s early jobs included being a stagehand, a floor manager at both the BBC and Granada TV, and a reporter at the Manchester Evening News. Having been made redundant from there in 1976, Shah used his redundancy money and the proceeds of the sale of his house to launch a series of free newspapers in the north-west region of England under the name of Messenger Group.
At the time, the print unions were extremely well organised and powerful. The most powerful print union was the National Graphical Association (NGA), which used the ‘closed shop’ (an agreement between the employer and the trade union whereby the employer only hires workers on condition of their membership of the union) to good effect, and whose class-conscious members could and did shut down printworks at extremely short notice.
The NGA approached Shah, saying that they wanted to unionise the workers in his group of newspapers. Shah agreed to a vote of the workers being taken, but when six of the workers voted against unionising, the NGA called on Shah to sack them. Shah refused. While Shah could have dismissed the six workers, a 1964 legal case – Rookes v Barnard and others – had set a precedent which meant that Shah could have been held liable for punitive damages had the six workers taken legal action.
Rookes and the closed shop
Douglas Rookes was a draughtsman who worked for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (the predecessor to British Airways). He was also a former member of the Association of Shipbuilding and Engineering Draughtsmen (AESD), which he had left following a dispute.
Because BOAC and AESD had a closed shop agreement, the union demanded that the corporation sack Rookes and workers threatened to go on strike if he didn’t either resign or get sacked. BOAC managers suspended Rookes for months, presumably while they decided what to do, before they sacked him with a week’s pay in lieu of notice.
Rookes responded to his sacking by suing his former union’s officials, including the chair of his branch, claiming that he had been subjected to what is called ‘tortious intimidation’ – a civil law term which means a wrongful act that causes harm. Rookes made the case that he had been sacked despite not having breached the terms of his contract, and that he would not have been sacked were it not for the actions of his colleagues, who threatened to strike if he remained in his post.
Rookes essentially argued that he had lost his job because of the closed shop. He won his case in court, but the decision was overturned on appeal. Rookes continued to pursue the case, however, taking it to the House of Lords, whose members naturally seized on the opportunity presented to them to curtail closed shop agreements and overturn the Court of Appeal’s decision.
They found that the Trade Disputes Act 1906, which protected trade unions from being sued for damages after taking industrial action, did not protect trade unions or their members from behaving in an intimidatory manner towards members or ex-members. The union, which by this time was known as the Draughtsmen and Allied Technicians’ Association, had incurred considerable costs as a result of losing the case, and delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Blackpool in 1964 warned of the serious threat that the House of Lords’ ruling could have on the legal right of workers to strike.
While the Trades Disputes Act 1965 reversed most of the adverse impact of the Lords’ ruling, the judgement remained authoritative on punitive damages against trade unions and employers.
Shah and the print unions
Shah’s refusal to sack his six errant workers was met with a concerted and organised response from the NGA. Six other members of staff at the Warrington Messenger newspaper walked off the job in protest against Shah’s refusal to implement a closed shop agreement. Shah responded by sacking them.
Union members besieged the printworks to prevent newspapers from being printed or leaving the premises, and the police were then called in to escort delivery vans and secure the distribution of the newspapers. With the dispute spreading across the group and 4,000 workers descending on the Stockport Messenger’s printing plant, the police were further mobilised to break up the picket line.
Pitched battles broke out between both sides, with police forcibly breaking up picket lines and workers responding by throwing rocks and bricks. The clashes would become known as the ‘Battle of Winwick Quay’, in which dozens of strikers were injured.
The tactics deployed by the police in putting down the picket, including donning riot gear and forming protective walls, the use of roadblocks and checkpoints, mounted charges and excessive, brutal force, would all be deployed to full and ruthless effect in the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
Shah then took full advantage of two pieces of bourgeois law which had been implemented by the Thatcher government: the Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982. The 1980 act banned secondary picketing (workers picketing locations other than the one where the dispute is occurring), while the 1982 act banned the closed shop, under which all employees must be member of a specific trade union.
The Warrington Messenger dispute gave Shah – and the ruling class – an opportunity to test this newly-introduced legislation.
Shah secured an injunction against the NGA and the union was initially fined £50,000. However, it refused to either cooperate with the courts or pay the fine, so it was fined a further £100,000, then fined again to the tune of £250,000, and then a further £375,000. In November 1983, with the union still refusing to pay any part of the £675,000 fines that had been levied on it, the court ordered that the NGA’s funds be sequestered.
Now, with £10m of its assets seized, the NGA approached the TUC for help, but general secretary Len Murray (later Baron Murray of Epping Forest, OBE) repudiated the union and the TUC general council refused to follow through on promises of support that had been made to the strikers at a special congress in 1983.
The NGA had been betrayed, left completely isolated by the official trade union movement, and so was forced to concede defeat. But this defeat did not only set back the print workers; it was a hammer blow to the entire working class, setting a template for smashing organised industrial action that Rupert Murdoch was to use to devastating effect just two years later.
Today
On 4 March 1986, Shah launched the first new daily national newspaper in Britain for decades, entitled Today. Launching a daily national newspaper from scratch was an extremely difficult endeavour, even at a time when circulations ran into the millions as they did in the 1980s, but Shah believed that he had an edge that could make the newspaper financially viable: it would be the first full-colour daily newspaper to deploy computer-based typesetting – technology that took the task of newspaper formatting away from print workers and dropped it firmly into the lap of journalists.
For decades, newspapers used linotype machines to compose text for printing newspapers, a system that, while having worked extremely well since the end of the 19th century, required a six to seven-year-long apprenticeship to learn how to operate the machines proficiently, as well as to maintain and repair what was an extremely intricate and complicated piece of equipment.
This made printers a highly skilled and specialised group of workers, who worked shifts (mainly nights) and were often paid on a piecework basis (in effect, paid by the letter). This, along with the considerable strength of the trade unions that represented them, made these one of the most powerful sections of the working class.
But the technology that Shah deployed in the production of Today would sweep away all these old working methods and the skills which went with them. The printing presses themselves produced colour printing of variable quality, which could not be checked until the product was finished, and the software that was used to lay out each page of the paper was notoriously unreliable an prone to crashes, yet the launch of Today caused quite a stir in Britain in 1986.
Shah also seized on an opportunity presented to him by the treacherous and contemptible Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU), which was led by the arch-reactionary class collaborator Eric Hammond. The EETPU’s leaders made it their business in the 1980s to make sole-recognition deals with employers in return for no-strike agreements, which not only deprived other trade unions of the right to organise in workplaces where the EETPU held sway, but also denied the EETPU’s own members the right to ‘legally’ withdraw their labour.
Shah made a sole-recognition agreement with the EETPU, de-recognised the NGA and, in doing so, swept away the hard-won terms and conditions that workers had built up across the industry over decades.
Murdoch, Wapping and the transformation of the print industry
The whole British newspaper industry, whose daily circulations then ran to over 10m copies, saw the technology that Shah deployed, and the sole-recognition agreement that he had made with the reprehensible EETPU, as an opportunity not only to cut their costs and increase profits, but as a golden opportunity to smash, once and for all, the vice-like grip that the print unions had over their businesses.
The chief antagonist would be Rupert Murdoch, owner of titles including The Sun and The Times.
Murdoch, whose News International titles in Britain were then published and printed in London’s Fleet Street, was developing a new printing facility in Wapping in east London, where part of the city’s long-abandoned docks once stood. His plan was to use this facility to launch a new daily evening newspaper, the London Evening Post, to rival the established London evening newspaper, the Evening Standard.
In fact, the launch of this newspaper was a ruse to lure the print workers into a trap, leading to what was arguably the last major class conflict in Britain in the 1980s.
It was anticipated that the facility at Wapping, which deployed new printing technology and computer-based typesetting, would be run by workers who were members of the EETPU, with journalists using computer-based technology to write their articles straight onto the pages of the newspaper.
But the London Evening Post never made it into print. Instead, on 18 January 1986, Murdoch deployed the new facility in Wapping to print that weekend’s edition of The Sunday Times’ supplement. The 6,000 print workers based in Fleet Street, members of the NGA and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT ’82) responded to this open provocation by walking out on strike.
With legal advice stating that all 6,000 workers could be sacked and be owed nothing in compensation, Murdoch did precisely that.
Murdoch issued dismissal notices to the NGA and SOGAT strikers while EETPU workers, numbering about 680 – just a tenth of the number of workers needed to run the works in Fleet Street – printed Murdoch’s four national titles: The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times, from the facility in east London that became known as ‘Fortress Wapping’.
The Wapping dispute had begun.
For over a year, the workers maintained their strike while Murdoch ran repeatedly to the courts to ban SOGAT’s distribution members from ‘blacking’ (deliberately defacing the newspapers with black marker pen to render them unsaleable) and refusing to deliver them. Murdoch went to court again to ban NGA members from blacking The Times’ Educational, Higher Educational and Literary supplements.
The bourgeois courts also found that SOGAT was guilty of secondary action by picketing the Wapping print works, which was run by EETPU scabs and journalists who chose to ignore the instructions of their union, the NUJ, to refuse to carry out journalist typesetting. Murdoch argued that the SOGAT members could only picket their own place of employment, which was in Fleet Street.
SOGAT had £17m in assets seized by the courts and was issued with huge fines, with the presiding judge stating that the union must be “brought to heel” for its actions.
The striking workers came under the same regime of militaristic policing and brutality that had been inflicted on the miners in their strike of 1984-5 and on the striking printers at Eddy Shah’s Messenger Group in 1983.
The strike ended in early 1987 in total defeat for the print workers. Murdoch and News International, with the full collaboration and connivance of the EETPU and the support of bourgeois anti-trade union laws and judges, had sacked 6,000 unionised workers and replaced them with barely 700 members of an infamous and treacherous scab union.
The print workers and the industry that they worked in never recovered from this defeat, and the Wapping dispute marked the effective end of a period of almost 20 years of concerted class struggle in Britain.
The EETPU was expelled from the TUC in 1988 for violating inter-union protocols and brokering non-strike sole recognition agreements with employers. It merged with the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) in 1992, but its legacy of class collaboration and betrayal of the working class, veneered in terms like ‘moderate’ and ‘cooperative’ trade unionism, will endure for many decades to come, and must serve as a lesson on the mortal dangers of practising trade unionism in the interests of the ruling class, not the working class.
The enemies within
Eddy Shah’s Today struggled in terms of circulation and was bought up by the Lonrho conglomerate only four months after launch. It was sold again in 1987 to News International and the title closed in 1995. But it was Shah, who pioneered a fledgling newspaper technology that was first developed in the United States and which SOGAT’s general secretary Brenda Dean had herself seen first hand in 1985 on a visit to the States, whose actions ultimately led to the complete transformation of the British newspaper industry.
The new technology created the conditions which allowed The Independent newspaper to launch in 1986, but most notably, it also led to the decimation of the print industry and the trade unions that organised its workers.
SOGAT ’82 and the NGA merged in 1991 to become the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU). The GPMU then merged in 2005 with white collar and engineering union Amicus (which, though a process of mergers, was a descendant of the EETPU) and Amicus merged with the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) in 2007 to form Unite the Union.
In the 1980s, the number of workers in the printing industry in Britain stood at over 200,000. Today, that number has declined to less than 90,000, and the militancy and class-consciousness that once existed in the industry and its trade unions is no more.
While the story of the brave print workers and their defeat in the Wapping dispute should not be forgotten, nor should the legacies of those people without whom the defeat of the printers could not have been delivered – namely, Eric Hammond, leader of the traitorous EETPU, TUC leader Len Murray, and the proprietor of the Messenger Group in Warrington, Cheshire: Eddy Shah.
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