Taking on the Media Barons

"Taking on the Media Barons" is the challenge facing trade unionists and their supporters at a special TUC conference at Congress House London on Saturday 17 March, 2012.
The shocking revelations unfolding at the Leveson Inquiry have provided the clearest possible example of the corporate abuses and illegality which can thrive in a workplace where trade union membership has been banned.
Phone hacking and corrupt payments and collusion with police officers and other public officials flourished at Fortress Wapping, the non-unionised editorial and production plant which Rupert Murdoch established in 1986 after he sacked 5,000 print workers and banned membership of the National Union of Journalists.
Two leading trade union leaders – Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the NUJ, and Luke Crawley, assistant general secretary of the broadcasting and entertainment union BECTU – join Nicholas Jones to debate the issues facing the union movement in aftermath of the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World in this podcast for the CPBF.

Of the many emerging lessons from the Leveson Inquiry perhaps the most significant for the TUC is that the whole scandal surrounding the unlawful practices of the Murdoch press provides a telling illustration of the corporate abuses which can thrive without the restraining influence of the trade union movement.

If membership of the National Union of Journalists had not been banned at Fortress Wapping then it is very fair to argue that the culture of illegality would almost certainly have been restrained, that at least some of the reporting staff would almost certainly have thought twice before engaging in phone hacking or colluding with the Metropolitan Police in gathering information.

Likewise if union representation had been open to all of News International’s Employees then the print workers might well have said No as they did back in the unionised days of the 1980s when Murdoch’s newspapers like the Sun were trying then to publish the kind of inflammatory coverage which flew in the face of the ethical codes of the NUJ and the previous Press Complaints Commission.

Think too of the company’s financial and administrative staff: if there had been union representatives at Wapping perhaps they might have had some serious questions to ask about the tens of thousands of pounds in cash which was being handed over to editorial executives and reporters and which the Police say was being used to pay networks of corrupted public officials.