The NUJ jobs summit at the weekend was inspiring and practical, with sessions on building community campaigns and tackling the massive wave of redundancies sweeping our industry.
The conference agreed a motion proposed by general secretary Jeremy Dear and seconded by deputy general secretary Michelle Stanistreet, which called for co-ordinated industrial action and a series of regional rallies and debates about the future of journalism.
Central to this should be a discussion about media ownership. Many speakers at the summit noted that the root cause of the current crisis in the media industry is the failure of capitalism to provide adequate investment in staff and resources, and the capitalist media owners’ lack of commitment to quality and diversity in journalism.
Though the details are unclear, the NEC agreed at the weekend to establish a commission or working party to look into media ownership. An announcement on this is expected shortly.
NUJ Left must play a part in leading the debates to come, putting forward our ideas about how the media could be run on more democratic lines, opening up new opportunities for journalists to control more of the work they do.
The national union is rightly taking the opportunity the economic crisis provides to open up a debate on this issue. We must ensure our influence is felt.
Members will also take confidence from the commitment given by Jeremy at the summit - in answer to a point made by NUJ Left member Julia Armstrong, Sheffield Star MoC - to back chapels that take wildcat industrial action in defence of their jobs.
Jeremy pointed out the law requires him to repudiate chapels engaged in unofficial action, but he said he would refuse to do so.
More about what was agreed at the jobs summit, and a briefing about the profits being made by the big media companies, is on the NUJ website.
To join NUJ Left email nuj.left@googlemail.com
Posted by NUJ Left
This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 2:29am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.
“Many speakers at the summit noted that the root cause of the current crisis in the media industry is the failure of capitalism to provide adequate investment in staff and resources”
Just cut that down to “The root cause of the current crisis is capitalism”
In order to protect jobs and fight capitalism NUJ members putting their heads above the parapet as MoCs, FoCs and general activists must be able to rest assured that their union, and individual union officials, will support them during industrial action, ballots, etc, not throw them to the wolves or not support them at tribunals.
The NUJ’s recent track record does not support this. And as an organiser of pickets, votes of no confidence in management, strike ballots and a campaign to protect jobs this was not my experience.
It was a great conference – a fantastic optimistic feeling despite all the shit that’s going on. One thing, though, people will have to let go a little of the dogmatic phrases. OK if people really want to argue for the nationalisation of the Mail, Express and Torygraph, but do we really need to write “Nationalisation of the media with democratic control by the workers” into motions?
Rachel has a legitimate point, but the stronger and more active this network becomes, the greater the pressure on the leadership to back courageous members who take a stand over jobs and pay. As to the ownership debate – socialists must raise the issue of public ownership and workers’ control, but to think that simply means state ownership of titles is to see it through the eyes of the Mail, Express and Torygraph. We can demand state ownership of the presses for instance, or for broadcasters: demand that the privatised transmitters, tech services and programmes such as league football are returned to public control.
Well, my point wasn’t that I oppose state ownership (though, as an anarchist, I’d prefer social ownership or no ownership at all rather than state ownership – but anything’s better than privatised ownership), but that the knee-jerk dogmatic sloganeering is unhelpful.
The bailout of the banks and the car industry has put state ownership of/investment in private industry at the top of the politicial agenda.
Newspaper owners are even talking about state aid – though they just want it to keep up their astonomical profits.
It is the moment when we can introduce into the debate the ideas of nationaliastion under workers control with compensation on the basis of need only.
And we can also discuss more anarchist ideas about ownership.
I think the Left should organise meetings to discuss this around the country where we can gather ten people in a room.
‘State aid for newspapers – on our terms or the bosses?’ – could be the title.
If we don’t do it NOW we’ll miss the boat.
I’m happy to help organise a meeting in London.
I also understand Rachael’s worries but I think that we have to test out the national union’s commitment to what it’s saying now in practice if our chapels feel angry enough. I thought that Saturday was a good building block to seeing some real resistance that won’t leave chapels isolated to fight on their own.
I think that we have to do everything we can to build confidence to have a good chance of turning the fear members feel into anger and action. As was said several times on Saturday, we know that doing nothing means you’re stuffed anyway. My experience is that our bosses will never stop coming us to shore up their obscene profit levels unless they think we’ll fight back.
I also feel that abstract calls for workers’ control achieve nothing; what we need to do is prove we can lead a fight and open up the debate over media ownership at the same time.
Agree 100 per cent about the sloganeering. But to move on, shouldn’t the union be helping members, especially those being made redundant, to construct alliances either on or off-line, so that they can share best practise and experiences and thus help preserve quality journalism (presumably on-line in the future). Essentially I am hoping that there will be a flowering of journalism on-line, which the union could help foster and grow.