On the 24th January 1986, almost 6,000 workers from News International Newspapers rejected redundancy offers from Rupert Murdoch and instead chose to strike. This strike would become known as the Wapping dispute and would go on for 56 weeks, the second longest industrial dispute of the 1980s, behind the Silent Night strike of 18 months, and ahead of the miners strike of 54 weeks.
In the years prior to the strike, Murdoch, who already owned The Sun and The News Of The World, completed the purchase of The Times and The Sunday Times in 1981. Shortly after, he began construction of a new printing plant in Wapping, away from the journalistic hive of Fleet Street. After years of failed negotiating with his SOGAT (Society OF Graphical and Allied Trades), NGA (National Graphics Association) and AUEW (Allied Union of Engineering Workers) employees, Murdoch had the plant heavily fortified, eventually installing razor wire fencing and restricting almost all Union access. In order to assess required staffing levels, two print workers were allowed access to the plant, Tony Cappi and Terry Ellis.
Tony Cappi was from the low ranking RIRMA branch of SOGAT, that employed cleaners and tool-carriers. Historically RIRMA did not negotiate their own agreements and normally worked one to one with AUEW employees. Due to the significance of and tension in the negotiations for the Wapping plant, in 1983 Cappi rejected tradition and began to make his own assessment for RIRMA staffing levels in the new plant.
Terry Ellis was a rotary press engineer from the AUEW. Upon hearing about Cappi, Ellis controversially decided to join forces, a move that was shunned at the time as this level of collaboration between unions was frowned upon, Ellis described it as a feeling of an “undercurrent”. The two of them became some of the only of Murdochs print workers to be allowed into Wapping. Over the next two years, under the pretence of assessing staffing numbers, the pair leaked countless documents using their network of spies within the plant, ranging from high level NI employees to external contractors.
After the events of Wapping the pair worked together for many more years, under the collective name:
Stereotype