The immediate defence by journalists at the Financial Times of Chinese colleagues threatened by management with redundancy has brought complete victory. The FT chapel demanded unanimously that the redundancy threat be lifted from their four colleagues on the FTChinese website, and warned that otherwise FT journalists would ballot on industrial action. So management changed its mind.
Two of the four Chinese journalists are British citizens, and they all work on terms and conditions inferior to other journalists at the Financial Times. The newspaper had decided that the specialist group of Chinese journalists at the paper had to return to China on half their current salaries or else accept redundancy.
The NUJ chapel voted unanimously at a capacity meeting: “We condemn the outrageous treatment of journalists on FTChinese. We demand no redundancies on FTChinese and that the journalists be placed on the same terms and conditions as the rest of FT editorial We will ballot for industrial action if these demands are not met."
David Crouch, the union’s father of chapel at the newspaper, said: “We are pleased that our employer has realised just how unfair and unacceptable were its proposals for our Chinese colleagues. We look forward to talking with management about securing the future of our Chinese journalists at the Financial Times on proper terms and conditions.”
NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Financial Times management has had the good sense to reconsider an unacceptable decision. Our FT Chapel is to be congratulated on its speedy and determined resistance to a management error which was entirely unacceptable to the culture of the diverse media culture of the NUJ.“