NUJ eyes web challenge
WORKERS, MAY 2007 ISSUE
IT WAS back to Birmingham for the National Union of Journalists on its hundredth anniversary – back to the city where the NUJ was founded in 1907. And it was in many ways back to basics, too, with most of the discussion on industrial issues such as the move to "integration", with journalists increasingly being asked to write stories for both print and web while simultaneously taking photographs and video and preparing podcasts. Freedom of Information – or more accurately its absence – figured strongly as well.
Two events in the Middle East overshadowed the conference: the kidnapping of NUJ member and BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza, and the unlawful killing of another NUJ member, ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd, by American forces during the invasion of Iraq. Delegates heard first-hand from his colleagues of the work going on to get Alan Johnston back. The issue has been taken up by the International Federation of Journalists as well as the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate and the American journalists' union. On Terry Lloyd, the NUJ is calling for the extradition of those responsible to face trial in Britain.
The NUJ's is a strange conference. Lasting a scant two-and-a-half-days, it debates (to varying degrees) around 200 motions, so there is often little time for discussion. But what discussion there was revealed some of the weaknesses that have dogged the NUJ and other unions for some time now. The NUJ went through a long spell of derecognition in the 1980s and early 1990s, and though many of the agreements have been won back and there have been fights over pay and cuts, confidence is still being built. More importantly, there is a disconnection between the membership and the people who represent them.
How else to explain the motion carried on outsourcing of jobs to India and other low-cost countries that said that the union should be against "protectionism"? What are unions for if not to protect members? We'd fight to stop work going down the road at cheaper wages...so why not to stop it going out of the country for even lower ones?
An example of the mess the union is in came with a debate on whether to ballot the membership on affiliation to the Stop the War Campaign. The motion fell, but not before opponents had argued that the NUJ already supports the campaign through the executive and had no need to affiliate – and that anyway the membership would vote against affiliation in a ballot. So it's OK for the union to support something the membership opposes? The other side in the debate was equally blameworthy, arguing that it is the role of the executive to go out and politically educate the membership!
Like many unions, once you move out of the workplace the members are not in control of the NUJ, mainly because they are content to leave that to a tiny minority. That can't be allowed to continue into the union's next 100 years.