ABSTRACT
Trade unions representing journalists and production workers in the provincial newspaper industry in England and Wales experienced the greatest extent of derecognition – in both absolute and relative terms – of any industry and for any trade union in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. They experienced a concerted and successful employers’ ‘offensive’ (Gall 1993; Noon 1993; Smith and Morton 1990), which allowed the newspaper companies to recast the employment relationship from one marked by some co-determination to one characterised by almost full managerial unilateralism. The outcome of this process has been the immiseration of newspaper workers’ conditions of work and employment through intensification and extensification of the wage-effort bargain (Gall 1995, 1998a, 2000a, 2001a). Since derecognition, the unions, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and the Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU), campaigned to maintain their membership base and organisational presence within these newspaper companies. On the one hand, they fought a sporadic struggle to provide representation to their memberships through individual and collective means, such as employment tribunal work and class law actions. On the other hand, both unions were the driving forces behind the crusade to achieve a statutory union recognition mechanism. Starting with the Press for Union Rights campaign in 1990, in which the NUJ and GPMU were the prime movers, the two unions were successful, through working with other unions, in winning the Trades Union Congress and Labour Party to policy positions of advocating the creation of a statutory union recognition mechanism by the mid-1990s, and seeing this through to the eventual Employment Relations Act 1999 (ERA), the provision of which for union recognition came into force on 6 June 2000.
