A colleague suggested to me today that I renew my NUJ membership. I’ve let mine lapse since my student days — the £10 or so I spent for a tacky piece of laminated plastic could have been better spent on, well, anything.
At the time, I was promised not only huge benefits of being a card holder — entrance to events, and so on; never happened — but also representation. A union that would stand up for my rights as a student journalist.
But, after getting this promotional bullshit fed to me at during an early lecture at university, I haven’t seen nor heard a NUJ rep since.
And not for want of trying, either.
Last year I did a placement at a well-known media company. I was, for want of a better phrase, taken the piss out of. They wanted me to do a job that was not only away from the area I wanted to work, but was away from the company’s BUILDING. Instead, I was logging in a ten minute drive away. No thanks — I’m not paying £25 a day (they don’t pay expenses, naturally) to offer free labour.
(That said, once the matter was resolved, it turned into a very valuable placement which has lead to me making many good friends and career contacts.)
At the time, I emailed the NUJ for advice. As a student member, I asked, what rights do I have as part of this Union?
No reply. My £10 didn’t even earn me an email offering advice. No phone call, nothing. They couldn’t even be bothered to link me to a relevant part of their website for help. Which is a shame — because they do have a guide for this sort of thing (PDF). But try following their tips and insist on being paid a minimum wage for your placement — you’ll have a big red boot mark on your arse before you’d even sat down.
More recently — in my quest for NUJ help — after seeing several adverts for unpaid internships at websites that were making plenty of money, I emailed the NUJ to ask them if there’s anything they/I/we could do about it.
No reply.
Let me ask you this: Is the NUJ really standing up for journalists?
The answer for me is a very firm and direct no.
The NUJ is a cowardly union, hiding away in offices in which they wish were still furnished with typewriters and a smoking room. Their magazine, ‘Journalist’, is symbolic of their attitude to the changing media world. Only very recently has it become available online. As a downloadable PDF, that is. A pain to download, a pain to read — and completely anti-Google. Journalists looking for its words of ‘wisdom’ wouldn’t find them too easily.
Now when I say hiding — I don’t mean they’re not out there campaigning. They are. Very hard, in fact, with chapels springing up and making a lot of noise in places like the FT and in unison against the Birmingham media hub.
What I actually mean by hiding is that they are cowering from the future. Here’s the NUJ, plowing money and effort into saying “STOP THE CUTBACKS!”… and then dealing with the blow with yet more anger and disbelief when it happens anyway.
If I were a member of the NUJ, I’d demand it help me as a struggling journalist. Where can I re-skill? How can the NUJ help me choose courses to enhance my online skills?
Simply: It can’t. Look at the diary — what do you see? Gloom — print this, rate cuts that. I’m not saying we don’t need meetings to discuss our rights in the workplace, but like the newspapers making the cuts, we are FIGHTING A LOSING BATTLE.
If the NUJ is really out there to act as a service for all working journalists, it needs to wake up. It needs to get over its fascination with tradition. It needs to pull its head from the sand, stand up and come up with a plan to really help those in need.
Right now, the only noise I hear from the NUJ is complaining.
“Save the journalists!” they’ll scream.
“But how we will survive? We can’t afford them,” say the newspapers.
“Well, er… we don’t know. Just SAVE THE JOURNALISTS, ok?”
Useless.
