The Equal Opportunities Revolution by James Heartfield

Author:James Heartfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Equal Opportunities Revolution
ISBN: 9781910924839
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Wapping dispute

In 1984 the General Secretary of the SOGAT union was Brenda Dean, who had just taken over from Bill Keys. Before going ahead with his move Murdoch had secretly negotiated with Dean who offered a reduction of manning levels at News International. What Murdoch wanted to know from Dean ‘was whether I could assert my new authority over the London members of SOGAT’. In her memoirs, Dean felt she had to explain how it was that she had secretly met with Murdoch and his chief executive Bruce Matthews. People would be surprised, she thought, to know how many such meetings ‘have littered industrial history and to find that quite often, when harsh words are being hurled across the headlines, remarkable trust and complete confidentiality can co-exist between the two sides’.

Explaining her willingness to push Murdoch’s line, Dean explained that ‘I was looking at the wider picture and wondering how I could break the logjam of the Fleet Street workers’ attitude’, adding that ‘change, like it or not, was coming fast’. Murdoch was impressed by Dean but had his doubts about her ability to deliver the traditionally militant print workers: ‘I looked him straight in the eye and told him I did not know but I was going to have a bloody good shot at it.’24 But while he was talking to Dean, Murdoch had secretly arranged a ‘sweetheart’ deal with the electricians’ union, the EETPU, and its leader Eric Hammond, to replace the print workers with their recruits.

Gender was key in both Brenda Dean’s relation to the London print workers and also to the Wapping dispute. When Dean won the vote for General Secretary she became the first woman to lead a trade union. Dean saw union militancy as intrinsically male, writing about the ‘left-wing macho clique’ that opposed her. Her base of support was outside London, where more women worked in the trade. She was facing down the ‘London Central branch who ran the union and where the power lay’, trying to rein in the ‘bloody-mindedness and strong-arm tactics for which the London print workers were infamous’, as she saw it. When the conflict with Murdoch came, ‘the testosterone amongst London print workers, who loved a fight, convinced them that they would win it’. In Dean’s mind, if only the London Central Branch had been faced down earlier, the union ‘might have avoided the ultimate disaster of Wapping’.25 Dean’s charge of testosterone-fuelled, macho militants echoed the allegations of ‘picket line bullies’ that could be heard from the Tory backbenches and in the tabloid press. Feminist Beatrix Campbell wrote of the characterisations of trade union ‘Barons’ and ‘bully boys’, that ‘trade unionism is constantly represented in Tory women’s discourse as the unacceptable face of masculinity’.26

The dispute was very bitter, and the sacked workers protested outside the Wapping print works for a year. Though you might not have known it from the press reports, hundreds of women, mostly clerical workers, were also laid off and took part in the campaign, as did many of the male print workers’ wives.

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