In January 1986, some 5,500 workers employed by four of Britain’s national newspapers were sacked.
The Sun, News of the World, The Times and The Sunday Times were all owned by Rupert Murdoch’s
News International Limited, and the bitter industrial dispute that followed was to last 13 months.
Although generally referred to as a print workers’ dispute, many of those sacked were not printers at all, but managers, clerks, secretaries, librarians, copy typists and messengers who were members of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT).
In the year following the dispute the authors of this book, themselves previously librarians at The Times and The Sunday Times and active participants in the strike, interviewed many of the clerical workers involved in an effort to document their experiences. Having spent more than a year recording these testimonies and transcribing the tapes onto the backs of discarded fast-food del
