On the NUJ elections

So today I got my ballot paper through from the National Union of Journalists, which is preparing to elect a deputy general secretary - the second most important full-time role in the union. Now, I am not all that up on the machinations of NUJ politics - my tiny office, unsurprisingly, has no chapel, I’ve never been to the AGM and somehow my intentions of going to the monthly meetings for London’s magazine journalists have yet to turn into me actually showing up. I know, I know - all talk, no action.

That said, I am a firm supporter of the union - which does all sorts of good stuff, both in terms of the usual pay and conditions stuff, but also in supporting journalists and freedom of the press worldwide. But I’m a member and a supporter for practical reasons - although it seems deeply unlikely in my present employment, if something went wrong I would want the backup only a union can provide.

So the least I can do is vote in the elections, right? Well, I don’t know much about any of the candidates. The first thing I notice on flicking through the booklet of candidate statements is that all of them are white and all but one are men. They all seem basically sensible - there’s nothing in any of the statements which makes me think “yes, this is the one for me!”

My feminist instinct, however, is to vote for Michelle Stanistreet - and, no, not just because she’s a woman. However, as Action-without-theory points out, the union is yet another area where women have a ways to go:

The NUJ is rightly proud that just after the World War One the UK’s first ever equal pay agreement for women was negotiated with the national newspaper employers.
We should be less proud that in our 101 year history no woman has ever been elected general secretary or deputy.

This is an urgent issue for women journalists, as we hardly immune from the vagaries of gender discrimination, from the lack of women in high-profile slots, to low-paid women working on local newspapers for starting salaries of around £10,000. Michelle’s CV also includes time served on the TUC’s Women’s Conference, training women journalists in India on collective bargaining and gender equality, and… well… as a journalist at the Daily Express.

That was my only big concern - however, it turns out that Michelle was also a key part of the rebellion led by journalists working for the newspapers owned by Richard Desmond over Islamophobic and racist headlines - back in 2006, the union intervened at the eleventh hour and stopped the management going to press with a ‘joke’ version of the Daily Star called the ‘Daily Fatwa’.

Here she is speaking about the campaign:

Donnacha DeLong says:

Unwilling to sit quietly by as their names were associated with some of the nastiest anti-immigration and anti-gypsy campaigns in the media, the Chapel stood up and Michelle was in the frontline.

Well, short of information to the contrary, she looks like a pretty decent candidate to me - she has my vote.