Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had already won a decisive battle against labour the previous March, when the brutal Miners’ Strike came to a bitter end. Now she saw the opportunity to continue the rout, while simultaneously strengthening her support among London press barons.
The dispute centred on Rupert Murdoch’s new printing plant at Wapping, which did not employ the traditional hot-metal typesetting used in Fleet Street since the late nineteenth century.
On 24th January 1986, the print workers’ unions dedicated to that old Linotype method went on strike, hoping to protect their members from being eliminated from the production process. But with both technological progress and the Tory government against them, they ultimately failed to achieve their goals.
The invisible legacy of Wapping is all around us. It’s in the print copy we read every day in the newspaper industry, but it’s also felt in the pay packets of journalists.
If it weren’t for his East London plant, Murdoch might not have become the global giant of right-wing media by the late 1990s. The defeat of the print unions enabled him to reduce costs and maximise profits, thereby fueling further international expansion.
But the story isn’t just about Murdoch. Wapping reshaped the entire British media landscape by changing the way newspapers are made. No one is clearer on this than the Australian media baron himself.
“If it hadn’t been for that, there would certainly have been casualties by now,” Murdoch told Press Gazette in a 2005 interview.
Murdoch was trying to sell the myth that newspapers wouldn’t have survived if trade unions had retained the power to dictate the terms of their working conditions. In short, union power had to be vanquished to save the national press.
Newsrooms are smaller today, and most journalists are more precarious than ever, thanks to Murdoch’s victory. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of working-class men and women who worked on the production line are long gone.
Although the Wapping Dispute would drag on for 54 weeks, it was arguably over before it even began.
54 Weeks
What’s forgotten is that the print unions tried to compromise with Murdoch, who had been dragging out negotiations. The unions put forward their final attempt at a deal on 23rd January 1986, including provisions such as flexible working arrangements, no walkouts, and binding arbitration.
But Murdoch wouldn’t budge. He insisted on no union recognition, compulsory redundancies and minimal compensation. Because the unions considered these terms unacceptable, they called a strike for the next day.
Murdoch immediately sacked around 6,000 workers, replacing them with just 500. That had clearly been his plan all along.
Although the Wapping Dispute was triggered by the print unions’ decision to go on strike, Murdoch’s decision to respond with a mass dismissal means that it was technically a lockout.
This battle had been a long time coming. Murdoch had already purchased the Wapping site in 1978 and begun construction in 1980, just before he bought The Times.
Murdoch’s pretext for building a printing plant in Wapping was the launching of The London Post. But this was just a ruse to buy time. His company needed to perfect a new method of newspaper production using computers to circumvent the trade unions. Even journalists working for Murdoch were oblivious to the plan.
Because Wapping consolidated operations in a single facility, it would need only a small percentage of the workers who operated the Fleet Street print works running in the basements of newspaper buildings.
The National Graphical Association and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades, the two dominant print unions at the time, ended up competing for non-existent jobs at the Wapping plant.
Negotiations over the Wapping plant for producing The Sun and The News of the World began in 1983. Soon, The Times and The Sunday Times were also subject to talks.
“I was amazed. I thought the unions would immediately go to all the other publishers and say, we want lifetime contracts at once. Or try to set in concrete what they had already won,” Murdoch told Press Gazette.
“Instead, it was the publishers who went to the unions and said: ‘Look, you have to give us these concessions otherwise Murdoch will have a totally unfair economic advantage,’” he said. “So in the end it played right through.”
By November 1985, Murdoch made it clear he would insist on abolishing the closed shop. He sought to expand managerial authority over a flexible workforce with few rights, no strikes, and no lockouts.
“Remember, nobody in the private sector had won a strike of a major nature,” Murdoch said. “We took them on and were the first to do it.”
In the background, the press baron’s News International agreed with a strike-breaking electricians’ union to secure a smaller, cheaper workforce for the East London print works.
It prepared the new facility for the forthcoming battle, installing large iron barriers festooned with razor wire, leading to its being dubbed “Fortress Wapping.”
News International also lined up 1,000 delivery trucks to avoid the British Rail system, fearing a union response. The Australian company TNT operated the distribution effort to circumvent the railways.
Police were brought in from all over the country to block the protesters.
When print workers descended on the East London factory to picket, they faced a formidable security detail. The “scabs” who were their de facto replacements, far fewer in number, arrived in armoured buses from as far away as Southampton.
The Battleground’s Books Editor, John Foster, was a 17-year-old member of the Socialist Workers Party living in Britain at the time. He travelled to London in late January and early February with contingents of activists and ex-miners to join the Wapping protests.
“The general view was that the print workers were going to get the shaft, but that it was important to show solidarity with them nonetheless,” Foster said.
“Their union had not done a great job of addressing the situation from a tactical perspective and had let themselves be manoeuvred into a strike that they had no chance of winning,” he said.
Unlike the unions, Murdoch could rely on the British government for political and moral support. He had been courting Thatcher for years through his newspaper empire. The Sun, for example, whipped up jingoistic fervour over the Falklands War, famously cheering Thatcher’s decision to sink the Argentine battleship Belgrano.
As expected, the Tories backed a tough police response to the print workers picketing the factory. Thatcher claimed they were a “revolutionary minority” out to create public disorder. Much of the British press also sided with Murdoch, retaliating against the print unions that had cost them millions of editions in disputes over the years.
It was a dramatic and violent 54 weeks.
The striking workers took their struggle to the presses.
The Morning Star permitted its printers to produce the campaign paper. The Wapping Post—edited by Keith Sutton, who would later run News on Sunday, a failed attempt at a left-wing tabloid—satirised the notorious page three of The Sun with photographs of women riot cops wielding batons against male protesters.
Full-blown satirical copies of The Sun were produced with headlines such as “Murdoch Fucks Donkeys!” The Murdoch paper was also nicknamed The Scum, a name which took on special meaning following the paper’s shameful coverage of the Hillsborough disaster.
Describing a protest he attended, Foster noted that, “People started throwing literally everything that wasn’t nailed to the ground at a mass of police officers,” Foster said. “Then we all got tear gassed.”
In the end, over 1,200 people were arrested during the Wapping Dispute, while more than 400 police officers were injured.
Both protesters and local East Enders accused the police of violent tactics. Despite more than 440 complaints being lodged against more than 100 police officers, none were charged.
The chaotic scenes in Wapping were framed as violent protesters disrupting a perfectly sensible business operation. The unions were portrayed as corrupt neo-Luddites, while the sacked workers were depicted as extremist troublemakers.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party pursued an appeasement strategy. Just as he had let down the mineworkers, Neil Kinnock drew on class politics in his speeches only to vanish when the workers needed the party’s help.
“The gutless Labour leadership were trying to make concessions to an opponent who was explicit about their goal being destruction,” Foster said.
Murdoch’s arch-rival, Robert Maxwell, took the chance to claim the moral high ground by denouncing the Australian tycoon for betraying the workers. This would later ring hollow when Maxwell was exposed for raiding his workers’ pensions.
In the end, all the press baron from Melbourne required was to wait out the protests. The pickets stopped in February 1987, confirming a wretched defeat for the NGA and SOGAT.
From Murdoch’s perspective, the Wapping Dispute was “an absolute turning point for Fleet Street and the whole of the newspaper industry. But also a turning point, although to a slightly lesser extent, for the whole of British industry”.
Once again, the labour movement was left broken.
“Although it wasn’t pleasant,” Murdoch concluded, “I’m certainly very, very proud of it. And it’ll be part of my legacy.”
New Media Order
Four decades later, the legacy of the Wapping Dispute is still with us. Newspapers have gone from a heavy manufacturing sector to a post-industrial, digital sector.
In the era of cold type, the media has become very similar to the professional services industry. The days of over-staffed newsrooms and long lunches are over, just as office buildings no longer shake from the printing presses below them.
Although some journalists benefited substantially from the transition to digital production, the long-term impact of the Wapping Dispute ultimately made conditions more difficult for the majority.
Murdoch set out to co-opt the National Union of Journalists during the lockout. After News International offered NUJ members a new health plan and a £2,000 pay raise, the print union leadership tried in vain to get journalists to oppose the new plant.
Refusenik journalists who didn’t support the change risked getting sacked. Faced with the choice between more money and unemployment, most hacks felt compelled to comply.
In the initial aftermath of Murdoch’s victory, many journalists did benefit. Because production costs were suddenly much lower, it was possible to pay them better while still increasing profits.
David Yelland, former editor of The Sun, once claimed that every journalist owes Murdoch around 10% to 20% of their salary to what he called “the Wapping revolution.” But he’s only talking about senior journalists who hold the few stable jobs left at national newspapers.
The farther we get from the Wapping Dispute, however, the clearer it becomes that the new way of making newspapers heralded was bad for most people working in the newspaper industry, including journalists.
The long-term results of the post-industrial turn, combined with the collapse of newspapers’ traditional advertising base, have dramatically changed the ratio of well-paid journalists to precarious writers.
Pay has been suppressed for most early-career journalists. Permanent contracts are rare. Benefits are increasingly skewed, favouring the lucky few. And freelancing is more difficult than ever.
Yet even some of the best liberal journalists continue to defend Murdoch’s victory over print workers.
When Murdoch announced that he was stepping back from the daily operation of his companies, former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger wrote an article for his current publication, Prospect, arguing that the press owes a great debt to the tycoon.
“Someone had to find a way to move newspaper production from the 19th-century methods of newspaper production to the computer typesetting now used the world over,” Rusbridger wrote. “Many tried and failed. It took a Murdoch to succeed.”
The Wapping Dispute wasn’t just a defeat for trade unions, but the sweeping away of a whole order. Fleet Street would no longer be the centre of the British media landscape.
While the technological shift from hot to cold type may have been irresistible, the accompanying ideological and economic changes were not.
“Once the shift in technology starts to happen, it’s a matter of what Marx called the mute compulsion of the system,” Foster said. “It’s not really possible to stop it. The workers have to find a way around it.”
Unfortunately, the print workers who lost their jobs in the Wapping Dispute lacked both the support and the strategy to achieve this.
Once victorious, Murdoch sidelined the electricians’ union that helped him break the print unions. The rest of Fleet Street soon followed his example, moving operations out to cheaper printing plants before eventually abandoning the street altogether.
By the time the Wapping plant was sold for £150 million in 2012, Fleet Street was inhabited by lawyers, insurance brokers, tax advisers and consultants, with barely a trace of its storied past in sight.
Now the newspapers that Rupert Murdoch loved so much are themselves a dying breed, undone by the same cost-cutting mentality that doomed the workers who once produced them.
As the UK media struggles through another period of radical change, avoiding its cruel fate will require us to learn hard lessons from history.
Photograph courtesy of David Shankbone. Published under a Creative Commons license.
