FOR the 40th anniversary of the dispute this Morning Star special supplement honours the brave struggle of all the workers sacked by a vicious multinational.

A conspiracy to get rid of the trade union workforce took several years in planning and execution and led directly to the strike. The stages of the conspiracy are recorded here in a timeline of the history of the dispute.

Strikers, supporters, journalists, legal advisers and academics give their account of what took place before, during and after the strike which began on January 24 1986, and ended on February 5 1987.

Over several years negotiations had taken place intermittently with the owner of The Sun and the News of the World for a move to Wapping of the printing and warehouse/distribution stages of production of the two newspapers.

During 1985, shortly after the end of the miners’ strike, the company halted negotiations. It announced a few months later the only subject for talks would be new conditions for the fictitious London Post.

Less than a year from the calamitous outcome of the miners’ strike to defend their industry, printworkers were sacked within 30 minutes of beginning their own strike for survival in January 1986.

During 1986 elements of the conspiracy were revealed. Accusations of preparing and training a pirate, scab workforce levelled against the company proved to be true. Eleven days after the dismissals the Morning Star published a leaked letter to the company from its lawyers, Farrer’s.

It reiterated the advice of how to dismiss an entire workforce by provoking a strike. A few months later, revealed in the court cases brought by the company in an attempt to prevent the unions from pursuing the dispute, was the establishment a year earlier of “shadow” companies formed for each main component of production and distribution.  

This was done to render illegal any industrial action or picketing as the workers were dismissed by their original employer not by the “shadow” companies.

These and other steps in Murdoch’s plan were also exposed by Linda Melvern, a former member of the Sunday Times Insight team. The book was published in November 1986.

In the threatening atmosphere of the 1980s, trade unions and trade union members were vilified at every turn and blamed for all society’s ills. Murdoch’s News International, printer and publisher of The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World was cheered on.

Its ruthless example was followed by P&O Ferries and subsequently countless other companies and employers exploiting the absence of effective legal protection of the rights of workers to defend themselves.

The inability to use trade union strength to enforce rights has corroded working life for millions of people. Progress towards better social and working conditions and rights for the working class has been slammed into reverse by the nation-changing onslaught of capitalists, employers, landlords, the government and the law.

Editorial excess, now reflected and magnified on an unimaginable scale in social and digital media, allows manipulation of truth and outright lies in the absence of redress, right of reply or union protest action.

The brazenly hypocritical claim by Murdoch that getting rid of the unions and union members would result in more and diverse publications was parroted by other publishers and media commentators. There are now fewer newspapers and more concentrated monopoly ownership of print and digital media.

Much has been written about the Wapping dispute, mostly from the point of view of the employers, blaming the print unions and their members for their own demise, new technology, excessive pay, overmanning.

The Workers Story of the dispute, starting with the 25th anniversary events, sought to dispel the myths. In this Morning Star 40th anniversary commemoration the causes and conduct of the dispute are examined; the anti-union laws, the role of the police, the state of the media then and now, the need for renewal of trade union mobilisation, measures for media democracy, ownership and the right of reply.

The just demands of the sacked workers for reinstatement of jobs and trade union rights remain unfulfilled but standing to be taken up by a new generation of determined trade unionists.

Ann Field is a retired national officer of Unite GPMU sector.