I gasped when I heard the news, in spite of more or less anticipating the vote. The journalists of the Daily Telegraph voting to go on strike! Whether it happens or not, it's a landmark decision. It certainly shows the strength of feeling for more than three-quarters of the National Union of Journalists chapel to vote for strike action. But, as I say, the vote may well not turn into action. Firstly, the chapel represents only part of the total editorial staff. Secondly, the chapel still has to meet to decide if it should take industrial action. Thirdly, given that the ballot was held back at Canary Wharf, the fact of the move to Victoria may have diluted the militancy.
I can't help but feel that the owners and managers wanted to do too much too quickly. By deciding on a move of office, the embracing of wholly new working arrangements, retraining, and a round of painful redundancies all at once was fraught with danger. They went for the Big Bang rather than the soft landing. That said, however, perhaps the latter option would have produced other difficulties. There probably was no easy way.
On the other hand, no-one can call the NUJ chapel leader, John Carey, a wild leftie. He is a sober, polite, reasonable man who genuinely feels he and his members have been ignored. If management want to get everyone on side as it pursues the dream of a fully functional multi-media newspaper operation it needs to address Carey's concerns.
The undeniable truth is that, just as the technology is changing, so is the journalists' union. At a recent Journalism Matters campaign meeting in the Guardian Newsroom, a veteran journalist-turned-academic asked the NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear why the union had, at last, embraced a genuine cause for concern - the future of journalism. Dear overlooked the implicit sarcasm to explain that every journalist was now affected by the digital revolution and that matters of wages and conditions were umbilically linked to the current changes.
But I also grasped, as did the questioner in acknowledging the passion of the reply, that the old distance between owners and managers on one side and the NUJ on the other could be narrowed. The Telegraph dispute may offer a guide as to whether that is a hopeless dream or whether there could be genuine benefits in seeing the point in each other's argument.
.jpg?w=600)
