About 50 predominantly young journalists at the Coventry Evening
Telegraph, part of the Trinity Mirror Group, are striking over low pay.
Stephen Hallmark, a member of the NUJ Coventry Evening Telegraph
chapel (sub-branch), explains the background to the dispute for The
Socialist.
Knowing that the wage you earn in relation to the profits your
company produces is pathetic is one thing. But the question is how to
change it.
The figures speak for themselves. Trinity Mirror last year had
profits in excess of £250 million, whereas a trainee reporter will
start on £11,500.
Adverts are carried in the Evening Telegraph encouraging would-be
reporters to sign up to a Trinity Mirror journalism training course, a
package that costs £4,000. It fails to explain how a newly qualified
trainee would be able to pay that debt off as well as afford to rent a
property in Coventry, and eat.
Our protest was sparked by this year’s pay offer, a 2.75% rise –
below the rate of inflation. The company’s justification for the miserly
increase was that the figure represented inflation on a basket of goods
– excluding house prices. Presumably they expect us to live either with
our parents, or in a tent.
It was my first time on a picket line, and it was an experience I
shall never forget.
The usual colourful antics such as placards, banners, flags and
"honk your horn if you support us" signs were combined with
one of our photographers clad in a monkey suit handing out peanuts and
explaining to bemused passers-by that if you pay us peanuts you get
monkeys. The police were less impressed when the monkey began cooking
sausages on a disposable barbeque on the main drag into the city centre,
but he was allowed to feed the picket line before extinguishing the
fire.
But for me the most amazing thing about the strike was how it brought
the chapel together, and how it created a special spirit between us.
The older hands reminisced about protracted action in the 1970s. I
got to talk to people from different departments who I’d never really
met before, and those of us making our striking debut learnt the true
value of being a member of a vocal trade union. Each of us sacrificed
money to make a stand and to ram home the message that trainees deserve
more.
I am privileged to work at a newspaper with many passionate and
committed trade unionists.
We believe that local journalism is a wonderful vocation. But we also
believe the time has long since passed whereby the management is able to
take advantage of the fact that we love the job, and therefore can be
fobbed off with pitifully poor pay. And how can a newspaper be truly
representative if the working classes are priced out from getting the
work experience and training necessary to get the job?
We have a young newsroom, and being present in the NUJ chapel
meetings in the run-up to the first day’s strike action was an
invigorating and emotional experience.
We were all committed to taking a stand. We were not swayed by two
derisory offers – each of £100 – which management bizarrely anticipated
would satisfy us, and we were not scared by a string of badly worded and
threatening letters which informed us of the ramifications of our
actions. Quite the reverse, the management’s clumsy approach
strengthened our resolve.
It was more sobering to learn that the management hadn’t budged, and
initially I felt dispirited, but the strength of feeling at the next
chapel meeting took most of us by surprise. We had thrown down the
gauntlet, and were not ready to fold.
The fact that management had made ‘loyalty’ £50 payments to the few
who had broken the strike – 43 members of our chapel refused to cross –
again served to convince us to take more action, in the form of
mandatory meetings. And when we were told that attending a mandatory
meeting would result in us not being paid for the (whole) day, we
refused to crumble and called a two-day mandatory meeting!
After four days of action during a three-week period, the management
agreed to come to the table, and pledged to introduce a ‘skills matrix’
next May. And backdate it by one month.
They had previously agreed to implement the ‘skills matrix’ in 2003,
and the offer again served only to strengthen our resolve.
So now we are on strike for five days, and we are committed to making
our stand.
