Most print journalists remain unaware of the extent of protection available to them under the law. This lack of awareness of their rights has much to do with the recent history of the media. In 1995, when I was first offered a job at the Times of India, I signed a contract with the paper’s owner, Bennett, Coleman & Company. I was not given the option of joining as a wage-board journalist. The term designated those hired under an older regime, in which being a journalist was much like being a civil servant: the job came with fixed hours, and pay grades, determined by a government-mandated wage board, that were based on seniority. These conditions were set by the Working Journalist Act, 1955, which had been enacted by Parliament for the editorial staff of print organisations. My fellow hires and I took it for granted that, since we were being paid better wages than we would have gotten under the wage board, we would not enjoy the job security it provided. This is an illusion that I lived with for eighteen years, until I was told by a subsequent employer, the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, that I should leave Open magazine under mutually acceptable circumstances. It was a suggestion I did not take up. It was only when it became clear that the management would fire me if I did not accept a sum of money they were offering me and move on that I began examining what rights, if any, journalists enjoy under the law. I eventually discovered that, as a print journalist, the Working Journalists Act still applied to me. Hartosh Singh Bal on the Working Journalists Act, a tool print journalists can employ to protect their editorial integrity and their jobs.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 08:30:00 +0000
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