When is a negotiation not a negotiation?

After two weeks of negotiations with Daily Record & Sunday Mail MD Mark Hollinshead and his team, I needed a rest. My condition was probably exacerbated having had to cancel my flight to Spain an hour before take off with the announcement of the 93 jobs cut.
However at the end of the fortnight at a mass meeting of members in Central Quay I felt we were on the brink of a deal that might have been described as historic.
Both parties had sought a negotiated settlement on what was an ambitious restructuring with large scale job cuts affecting around 40% of editorial staff.
The initial terms on offer were enhanced, certainly better than statutory but nowhere near enough to attract the level of volunteers required. As talks continued we put forward constructive proposals which targeted those most at risk or likely to take the VR package.
Improvements included aggregating part time and full time service for current part time staff, totalling the full time and part time history for calculating redundancy pay.
A number of members had argued they had worked for the company on a casual basis prior to going onto staff and the company appeared to be prepared to add those years into the pot.
We continued to push for an additional sum to round off what we wanted to be seen as a recipe for setting the best voluntary deal possible.
I started to think about getting back on the holiday trail. The best laid plans can go astray and by Monday morning I had learned that the Trinity board of directors had refused to allow their MD to negotiate a deal with NUJ Scotland.
I was told that local talks could not change their central policies and because there were redundancies planned for a variety of Trinity regional offices then we would not be allowed to set a precedent of better terms.
I suggested we could hold national talks, but Trinity's policy was that they do not hold national negotiations. I proposed to Mark that we could call them local talks with a view of reaching an agreement which would not set precedent. Sounds reasonable, I thought, but was then informed the Trinity board were not inclined to hold any talks which might lead to them having to give staff more compensation before they lose their jobs.
There is no doubt this stupidity is poor industrial relations and could cost Trinity more in the long term through legal and industrial action.
There is no logic in any of their behaviour, except their obesession with co-ercion.
Local negotiations have been disabled and national talks rejected, seriously damaging the credibility of senior management to strike a deal and undermining the attempts to maximise the number of volunteers.
It is bad management and poor judgement by "Fat Cats" who regularly reward themselves handsomely for managing the downward spiral of decline. We need to stop this madness unless we are all prepared to see a fast-tracked end to quality newspapers in this country.

Sensitive to criticism

In this week of bombshell size surprises, I am surprised that certain media bosses are surprised at being criticised in a wide range of media about their behaviour in the industrial relations field. Mirror Group management were apparently upset at STV interviewing me on screen for the six o clock news after their announcement of 90 job cuts at The Record and Sunday Mail and outsourcing work to England. They were probably less upset with BBC Scotland only doing a piece on DriveTime with little or nothing on Reporting Scotland or Newsnight Scotland, but maybe there is an old pals act in place there - time will tell. I was then criticised on Facebook by a freelance member for failing to get blood out of a stone that is Johnston Press and had to say I wasn't too happy and responded accordingly. I was then criticised by STV management for daring to put a tweet onto the NUJ web site highlighting a little difficulty we are having with poor communication from managers. For a communication industry we really do have problems with communicating in more ways than one.