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| Volume 56 Number 2, January 31, 2026 | ARCHIVE | HOME | JBCENTRE | SUBSCRIBE |
Workers' Weekly, January 24, 1987
One year has passed since the brutal sacking of five and a half thousand print workers by Rupert Murdoch's News International and the move of Murdoch's titles to Wapping.
This act was a savage onslaught on the print workers and their rights, representing the decisive move by Murdoch in his single-minded pursuit of maximum profits in the conditions of the capitalist crisis. It was an integral part of the offensive against the workers by the capitalist class as a whole to unload the whole burden of the crisis onto their backs, involving throwing workers out of their jobs on a massive scale, as well as further attacking and restricting their trade union rights.
News International is still arrogantly refusing to consider for a moment the reinstatement of the sacked workers. It is still, as it has done from the beginning, pursuing its attacks on the workers and their unions, utilising the Employment Acts to obtain injunctions, issue writs claiming damages and so forth, in order to force the workers to their knees and liquidate their resistance. The police have been used from the outset to attack and intimidate the pickets, to ensure the continued production of Murdoch's newspapers, and enforce the court injunctions outlawing mass pickets. [...]
The offensive at News International opened the way for further attacks, sackings and introduction of new technology in the newspaper industry as a whole, as the press barons saw that Murdoch through his vicious actions had strengthened their hand, and were able to cite the cut-throat competition with Murdoch as "justification" for their own offensive against the workers.
The whole history of the struggle, from the well-laid and vicious plans of Murdoch to carry out wholesale sackings and transfer printing to the heavily fortified Wapping plant, the continual unprovoked and savage attacks by the police on the print workers' pickets and demonstrations, the use of the Tory government's anti-worker legislation to impose massive fines on the print unions and sequester their assets, Murdoch's employing every tactic so as to utilise this legislation to the full and bring the forces of the state and the courts to bear against the workers - all show that the workers can have no illusions about the nature of the capitalists, their state and their government. It reveals this nature to be most ugly, rapacious, vicious, violent, deceitful and bullying, and that as the crisis intensified, the capitalists will stop at nothing to unload its burden onto the working people, to exploit them to the bone, to club them into submission, to split their unity against exploitation, and to attempt to smash their dignity. It shows they will do everything in their power to make the working class and people pay for the crisis and to maintain in existence their system of wage slavery and extraction of maximum profit.
[...]
It is the workers' own struggles that are decisive in winning their demands. The workers' rights - the right to strike, to a livelihood, and so on - and their interests can only be served through their principled, vigorous, uncompromising and independent class struggle, through self-sacrifice and keeping the initiative in their own hands.
The workers have refused to be cowed by the attacks on them, they have twice rejected attempts to impose on them "final offers" [...] which would have compromised their dignity and their just demands for reinstatement and for their full democratic and trade union rights. They have continued their pickets and demonstrations outside the Wapping plant.
The workers are justly outraged by the sackings and the continual savage attacks on them and their right over the past year. [...]
It has shown that the workers can have no illusions bout the viciousness of their class enemy, about the lengths to which it will go to maximise profits, to trample on the workers' rights, and to maintain its system of wage slavery. [...]
The struggle has shown that the workers are not prepared to lie down in the face of the capitalist offensive, to see their dignity trampled in the mud [...].
The fact is that the viciousness of the attacks on the working people by the capitalist class reflects also the depths of the crisis of their system, to which neither the capitalists [nor] their political parties [...] are able to offer any solution. It is only the working class that can lead the people in solving the grave problems which confront them. [...]