recognition


Activists fought a David and Goliath battle for union recognition at Springer Nature publishers. Jenny Sims speaks to them


Springing into action I


t took six years but NUJ members can justifiably celebrate a hard-won victory. At last the union is


recognised at publishers Springer Nature, but recruitment and retention will continue to be a top priority for the chapel.


Michelle Grayson, a senior editor at


Nature, mother of chapel and a key figure in the fight, says: “It’s been tough, but we’re really pleased we made it, and I’m looking forward to the next stage.” Compared to the amount of grafting, persuasion and negotiation needed to approach the central arbitration committee and go through the process of getting recognition, retention and further recruitment has got to be easier. The story is a long and complicated one and, frankly, Grayson probably had no idea of the task she was taking on when she agreed to help managing editor Colin Sullivan, a long-time NUJ member and father of the chapel from the days when Nature was owned solely by Macmillan Publishers – and before it merged with Springer. The merger helped turn Springer


Nature into one of the world’s biggest global research, academic, educational and professional publishers. What used to be a tight, small, self-contained set of employees at Nature Publishing Group became part of a big, sprawling organisation with around 1,200 employees based in King’s Cross in London now employed within an extremely complicated business structure. Grayson recalls: “I came from the


Nature side of the company. We used to have a chapel when I joined nine years ago, then we got stealthily derecognised.”


10 | theJournalist This stealthy derecognition crept in


without any warning, just before several internal company-wide reorganisations. “It took a while to get the wheels


back on the bus and focus ourselves on getting recognition,” Grayson admits. No longer were editorial and production teams working together in one office – staff were spread through different business divisions of the company. Sullivan adds: “The NUJ has always been strong within the Nature family of titles and the company has consistently underestimated how widely supported the union is. “Our task in the new, bigger world of


Springer Nature was to be able to rationalise our support in terms of the new corporate structure to give us a clear and consistent bargaining unit for recognition. “That meant a lot of work poring


over organisation charts and clarifying disparate job titles in order to show how the proposed bargaining unit would work.” Grayson did a lot of the legwork, and


Sullivan pays tribute to her. “It was a truly Herculean effort by Shell. I think she now knows more about the corporate structure in the UK than the HR department.” She adds: “It helped that we


had a historical core of chapel members, and that we had a big, stable workforce.” There was a bureaucratic barrier: because they did not have union recognition, staff could not use company email or hold meetings on the premises to recruit more colleagues to the


NUJ to get the numbers up so they could fight for union recognition. The job was tough, as Grayson points


out: “NUJ subs are fairly high if you earn above a certain amount. Nature is a prestigious journal and pays fairly well. Many of our editors are in the highest pay band, and found the subs off-putting.” But in came the cavalry – NUJ HQ.


The magazines division helped fund off-site lunchtime recruitment meetings in pubs (free food was a definite attraction) and national organiser Fiona Swarbrick negotiated agreements to offer attractive one-off deals for new members to help overcome the recruitment barriers. One of the most successful inducements was a 24-hour flash sale offering 50 per cent off fees for a year. Their bargaining unit now has an


NUJ membership level of just over 51 per cent of the 375 editorial staff working on Nature titles. They are ‘safe’. However, Grayson admits: “I don’t think we could have done it if Fiona hadn’t fought for us to get discounts.” Their next battle is to get recognition for staff on other (non-Nature) titles at the company.


OLDTIME / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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