Newspaper publisher Eddy Shah vs the print unions

An industrial dispute which became extremely significant took place in 1983 when Eddy Shah, a newspaper publisher from North West England expanded his operations from his base in Stockport, into Warrington. In doing so, he recruited non-union labour which provoked the National Graphical Association (NGA) into a walkout. Shah promptly fired six of the unionised workers, and a bitter dispute between the publisher and the union followed. However, the Thatcher government had recently introduced legislation aimed at curbing trade union power, and it had become illegal for unions to protest with so-called 'secondary picketing'; that is,  picketing of workplaces not directly involved in the dispute at hand. A mass picket against Shah's Warrington offices led to the NGA receiving a fine, which led to members in London's Fleet Street also walking out.

The dispute dragged on for several weeks and became increasingly bitter, and it came to a head in November 1983 when a mass picket consisting of over four thousand NGA members was confronted by a police operation including riot-trained squads. The police charged at the picketing union members and forcibly broke up the demonstration, ushering in a new era of confrontation between police and trade unions.
Shah ultimately prevailed in the dispute when the TUC failed to back the NGA, and the union conceded defeat. Eventually, Shah's publishing company entered into a single-union agreement with a different union, the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union (EETPU).

The significance of this victory for the regional publisher became apparent three years later when Rupert Murdoch used similar methods, only on a much larger scale, to centralise his newspaper printing operations to Wapping in London with new machinery. An even bigger and more bitter dispute took place then, but once again it was the publisher who prevailed and union power in the printing industry was broken once and for all.

Eddy Shah himself ventured into national newspaper publishing in 1986 with the launch of Today newspaper, the first British newspaper to be printed in colour. In an ironic twist, the paper failed to gain sufficient circulation and collapsed, only to be bought out by Murdoch's News International empire. (It eventually closed down in 1995.) He tried again in the late 1980s with The Post, a tabloid-style newspaper, which once again failed to attract readers and closed down after only five weeks. Following this, Shah sold up and left the publishing industry. He now runs leisure businesses, hotels and golf courses.

The industrial dispute between Eddy Shah's publishing companies and the trade unions set the tone for many more increasingly bitter industrial disputes in the 1980s, most notably the miners' strike in 1984/5, with the police becoming cast in the role of government enforcers.

A news clip reporting on the dispute: