UPDATE: Sunday’s threatened stoppage is now off, after Morning Star management agreed to return to the negotiating table. Watch out for further developments.

IMAGINE how your workplace union branch would function if the management controlled a block vote of almost half the membership through the mechanism of democratic centralism.

That’s the situation facing National Union of Journalists activists at the Morning Star. The chapel has voted by 11-10 to go on strike over pay and conditions, and a walkout is scheduled for this Sunday, I am told. Unlike similar stand-offs in recent years, the stoppage looks likely to happen.

Interestingly, the ballot represents virtually a straight split between the majority, made up of those who are not in the Communist Party of Britain, and the minority, made up of those who are, and thus bound to follow the party line. Leninist discipline, I think we used to call it.

Tensions have not been eased by a document circulated at the annual general meetings of the People’s Press Printing Society Ltd, which took place in Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Cardiff and London earlier this month.

The management committee report claims, in vintage Stalinist parlance reminiscent of a Comintern denunciation against a particularly over-enthusiastic section:

The actions of those members of the NUJ chapel who voted to gamble with the livelihoods of everyone at the paper are to be condemned as irresponsible and adventurist.

It might as well have gone the whole hog and branded them ‘Trotskyite wreckers and splitters’ while it was about it.

Just how serious things have become is made plain in an addendum titled ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place – Morning Star at Risk’, which was originally circulated to trade union general secretaries:

The PPPS management committee is firmly resolved to make no enhanced offers to the NUJ. We cannot afford to do so … This decision was taken in full cognisance of the fact that this may lead to cessation of production  …

Depending on how long the dispute lasts, the PPPS would probably very soon become insolvent. Insolvency would mean PPPS going into administration, with a risk of its ultimate liquidation.

Are management bluffing? I guess we’ll find out at the weekend. I do appreciate the point that the publication is unlike any other national daily, in that it seeks to promote the views of as broad a cross-section of the left as meets with the approval of the CPB, and to do so on an extremely minimal budget.

It is also undeniably much improved since its relaunch, and is now taking contributions from Socialist Workers’ Party and Green Party members, over and above the perennial flood of extremely dull trade union press releases and rehashed wire copy.

But that does not absolve the PPPS from its responsibility to pay a living wage. As an NUJ member myself, the chapel majority have my full support.