Wapping: legacy of Rupert's revolution
It was one of the most dramatic industrial disputes of the last century. 20 years ago this month, Rupert Murdoch secretly moved his newspaper business overnight to a fortress-like plant in Wapping, east London, sparking a bitter and doomed year-long strike by printers which revolutionised labour relations as well as the newspaper industry. Here three key players reflect on the drama
Sunday January 15, 2006 The Observer
The Editor: Andrew Neil Then: Editor of the Sunday Times Now: Publisher of Press Holdings, which includes the Spectator and the Business
'Before Wapping,' I explained recently to a group of young journalists, 'if any of you had done this' - I pressed a letter at random on the computer keyboard - 'the print workers would immediately have walked off the job and the paper wouldn't come out.'
They looked at me with a mixture of incompr. I wonder what the other side would say...ehension and incredulity, not sure if I was making it up or taking them for a ride. The proposition was so ludicrous that there are times I wonder myself if it was true. But it was.
Before Wapping, one print workers' union, the NGA (National Graphical Association) had a monopoly of the computer keyboard in the national newspaper industry. Journalists could compile their stories on old-fashioned typewriters, but only NGA members could use typesetting keyboards.
By the mid-Eighties, computer technology meant journalists could have keyed in their own material for typesetting, as they wrote their stories using computers. But computer keyboards in these days were an NGA fiefdom into which even other print union members were not allowed to intrude, never mind journalists. They guarded it much as ancient monks kept the mysteries of the quill pen hidden from plain folk behind monastery walls to preserve their monopoly on writing.
The ban on journalists using modern computer technology was far from the only absurdity in pre-Wapping newspapers. For most of the 20th century, Fleet Street had been a microcosm of all that was worst about British industry: pusillanimous management, pig-headed unions, crazy restrictive practices, endless strikes and industrial disruption, and archaic technology. If British unions were then (rightly) regarded as the worst in the western world, then Fleet Street's print unions were the unchallenged worst of the worst.
Wapping changed all that. In the process it saved the British newspaper industry. If Fleet Street had staggered to the end of the last century with pre-Wapping, absurdly high labour costs, world-beating low productivity, antediluvian technology and the industrial relations of the madhouse, then probably only a handful of papers would have survived - concentrated in Rupert Murdoch's News International and Lord Rothermere's Associated.
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The rest: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1686500,00.html
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam