THIRTY-NINE years on from the Wapping dispute, Rupert Murdoch and his apparatchiks remain wary of letting trade unions get a toehold anywhere in his empire, with UK journalists working for its Dow Jones outpost, publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
, the latest to have the chance of NUJ representation snatched away.
Members of the union had been working for several months to establish a chapel at Dow Jones, which, while housed alongside News UK’s Times and Sun and Murdoch’s publishing company HarperCollins in the “Baby Shard” at London Bridge, remains a separate company.
They were on the verge of submitting an application to the Central Arbitration Committee, which could have obliged managers to recognise them as an official bargaining unit, when, in what the NUJ called a “blatantly cynical stitched-up behind-the-scenes deal in the worst traditions of union-busting”, Dow Jones abruptly announced last week that it had chosen instead to deal with the “News Union”.
Formerly known as the News International Staff Association, this is the body set up following the strikes of the 1980s. It is entirely funded by Murdoch’s News UK, run in-house, and has long been denied the “certificate of independence” which confirms trade unions are properly free of management control.