NUJ leaders have successfully fought off a bid to force the union’s entire National Executive Committee to resign over a controversial house agreement on an Irish weekly paper.
The in-house agreement between management and the NUJ chapel at the Drogheda Independent theoretically gives editors the right to ask reporters to take pictures. Some photographer delegates expressed anger at what they saw as an encroachment on their profession.
The motion, which fell by a large majority, was submitted by South Yorkshire Branch and called for the NEC to issue a statement warning managements not to impose new technology without union agreement.
But NEC members, including new president James Doherty, argued that the executive did not have the power to overturn a chapel’s house agreement.
He said: ‘I believe that this is a union that represents photographers in the past, present and future. There was nothing that said we could overturn an agreement from a chapel where they had fought for years.”
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