NUJ NEC, personal capacity THE NUJ Left has pledged to step up its campaign to more effective fight against the employers derecognition onslaught.
Backing the stand of journalists taking action against the loss of to bargaining rights. the NUT Left AGM committed itself to vigorously opposing all Tory anti-union laws and buikding fighting unity with the GPMU and other media unions.
A generalised fightback against media employers was the recent one-day strike by London-based Morgan-Grampian magazine journalists, and by the decisions of provincial newspaper journalists at United Newspapers, led by the York. groop wide industrial action.
The action at Morgan-Grampian led to victimisation of chapel FoC Chris Wheal, who has been in the forefront of the recent anti-derecognition campaign.
The NUJ Left will be able to build on policy victories made at this vear's NU Annual Delegate Meeting.
Coordinated
A motion supporting cross. action against derecognition was supported, as was a left initiative to protect the NUJ strike fund from being raided by the right wing to solve the union's cash crisis.
But while the NUJ Left has been making the running on many crucial policy questions. the new realist right-wing have shrewdly counter attacked on organisational issues designed to wenken the left's influence The right scored an important victory by cutting the size of the union's lay-dominated national executive committee, an uninfluence of lay NEC members against the full-time officials. Crucially it will also get rid of much of the left's one-third of the NEC. highly effective thom in the side of new realists.
The right are pressing on with a wholesale attack on the undesigned to atomise the rank-and-file into workplace chapels with no common structures leaving them unable to launch any challenge to the right's control at the top.
An attack on the democracy of the ADM will most likely follow: the left must build its strength in readiness for the fight to come.