Just an idea, send a tip to The Age tip line before Monday. As far as I’m concerned, anyone processing these “tips” before Monday is scabbing, so offer them a thought or too for scabs. Send “Shame on scabs” to 0406 843 243 (The Age) and 0424 767 764 (SMH).
Fairfax Ltd’s mailing address is:
FAIRFAX MEDIA LIMITED
GPO 506
SYDNEY NSW 2001
Send them a letter expressing your thoughts of disgust as a Fairfax reader. Cancelling a subscription? Not buying a paper today when you would of? Make sure these guys know about it. Please no hatemail or threats though.
I also suggest that all bloggers use the rel=nofollow tag in links to Fairfax websites for the duration of industrial action. rel=nofollow deprives a page of the authority in google rankings that the page would otherwise have gotten from that link.
Again, it’s not much use unless you tell them about it.
- Support Jailed Egyptian Blogger...
- CollaborationSpace: New KB.com wiki...
- Disclosure Policy...
- Bandwidth Issues...
- Blog Concept: Send me on assignment...
Subscribe to my RSS feed or email service for much more!
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
on Sep 1st, 2008 at 11:46 am
While I agree with your sentiments, many of the contracts offered to staff at these papers (I don’t work for Fairfax by the way, but the large media organisation I work for has similar contracts and I know people at Fairfax as well who have told me about it) prohibit them from taking part in industrial action. Industrial action can lead to immediate dismissal under many of these contracts.
And with the current media climate in Australia and the complete lack of journalism jobs, I doubt dismissal is a risk many people would be willing to take.
You don’t even get a choice to argue about these contracts (individual contracts do not really exist in most of these organisations) and they are usually given to the younger journalists who have no bargaining power at all. They all started cropping up with these anti-union clauses post Workchoices. Thanks John.
So I don’t think the blame lies with the poor people who have probably very reluctantly been sequested to work shifts to cover for their striking collegues. For many of them it’s probably been a choice between scabbing or joining the dole queue, especially with the heavy handed behavior we saw to Mike Carlton.
But rage against Fairfax management by all means. We cancelled our subscription with angry letters.
on Sep 1st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Yeah, in the words of an old socialist I know, a strike by one person isn’t a strike, it’s just a resignation.
No strike clauses in contracts should be unlawful. But then, any prohibition on striking should be unlawful, and even when a strike is unlawful, the working class should have the confidence to walk out en masse.
A law or contract prohibiting a strike doesn’t achieve much if it can be universally defied.
Oh well, I have updated my post with a couple of other ideas.
on Sep 1st, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Yeah, I agree… the contracts are awful and it would be great if everyone had the courage to go “stuff you” and strike, despite these clauses.
But as a 21-year-old journalist going for my first full time journo job, I didn’t have a hope in hell of getting that clause removed and I know many people in a similar position.
The cuts are scary, for the quality of reportage and Australian democracy.
It’s hard enough as a journo having enough time to do all the research you want to do, follow up on all the interesting leads, build contacts, fact check, spell check and write intelligibly in newsrooms as they operate now, and it seems like it’s only going to get worse. Boo to “churn-alism”.