Newspapers - Progress in Glasgow
WORKERS, JULY 2009 ISSUE
Journalists at the Daily Record and Sunday Mail in Glasgow have suspended their industrial action over compulsory redundancies and changes in status for many members after the management backed down on several key issues.
The highly organised chapel (office branch) has been in action since April, with seven days of strikes and a work to rule, after management announced 70 job cuts out of a workforce of 240, and declared that 23 of them would be compulsory.
Eleven of the 23 have since been reinstated, and ten have left on enhanced redundancy terms. The chapel is still balloting on action over management plans to merge the newsrooms of the two papers and introduce new editorial technologies. But significantly, the management has now agreed that there will be no further redundancies without consultation and agreement.
The dispute was marked by an active public campaign supported by local politicians, and also tight coordination with freelance journalists, who received union hardship pay for loss of earnings.
The agreement in Glasgow came in a week where the NUJ also celebrated victory in the case brought against member Suzanne Breen, the Belfast-based northern editor of the Sunday Tribune, when judges refused to order her to hand over to the police her notes, computer files and other material relating to a story about the Real IRA.