“All right gentlemen, let’s plan a strike.”
Labour Minister Ong Pang Boon* fixed a steely look on us, but I thought I detected a quick smile as he made his momentous announcement. My heart thumped in mounting excitement. Earlier, it had been filled with trepidation. Like my other union colleagues, we felt we had wandered off the road, and into a dark tunnel, with no light shining at its end, when we decided to take on the formidable management of The Straits Times to force it to stop its unjust treatment of journalists. We had trooped into an anteroom in the minister’s City Hall office, fingers crossed, wondering how he would view our action — organised by leaders of the Singapore National Union of Journalists (SNUJ) — to cripple The Straits Times.
It had been a long and protracted struggle. Already, the first blow had been struck and the afternoon paper, New Nation, the forerunner of today’s The New Paper, had been forced to close following days of work-to-rule by the journalists. In those days, in 1971, with the Employment Act firmly in place, going on strike was near impossible, even though the right to strike was still a legitimate ultimate weapon of the workers. But nobody that the SNUJ had spoken to — government leaders and commercial bigwigs — gave us any hope of our being able to mount such an action and succeed. They felt The Straits Times, run by a firmly entrenched old-school British management, had the upper hand. The ancien régime was never going to accept change, even though all around the region, the colonial era was, slowly but surely, fading away into the sunset of history.
Could we swing Ong over to our side, to make him see the justness of our cause and convince him of our ability and willingness to whack off the last stone in our slingshot against a recalcitrant management?
The answer came soon enough. The large wooden doors leading to the anteroom swung open as if someone had thrust them forward with great vigour. Ong, who was in his early 40s then and a key man in the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, bounded into the room and sat on the wooden sofa, facing us. I opened my mouth to launch into my carefully prepared pitch as to why we had to teach the high-handed management of The Straits Times a lesson, that the time for change had come, etc., etc. But the minister had evidently made up his mind. Apparently, he had been briefed about what was going on. Rubbing his hands together like a magician about to pull off a spectacular act, his eyes glinting behind his steel-rimmed glasses, he said there was no need for us to belabour the point. “Gentlemen, if you want to succeed in your strike, this is what you will have to do.” And like a general mustering his troops, he rattled off a “war plan” … if we wanted to secure our final lap to victory against The Straits Times.
That tumultuous meeting in City Hall took place towards the end of 1971.
Ong, a lean tall man, dressed in a ubiquitous white long-sleeved shirt and pleated pants of an indeterminate grey colour, did not want to waste any time. No preamble. No ifs and buts. “This is what you will have to do. Listen carefully to me,” he said, brooking no opposition. He covered all bases. It was a good plan. We thought it was a good plan. But the devil lay in its execution. We wondered if all 2,000 employees of the company — the journalists, the printers and the administrative staff — had the guts, the temerity, to go ahead and take on the tough regime managing The Straits Times. We knew that there was enmity between City Hall and The Straits Times. Managers in The Straits Times were still wedded to the recent colonial past. They did not quite grasp the national agenda that what was needed in newly independent Singapore was developmental journalism that would help promote much needed economic growth. That the aim was to foster stable conditions to attract foreign investment and create jobs.
So union leaders were jubilant after the meeting with Ong. We had a powerful ally on our side. The battle against The Straits Times could now move into top gear. Most of us were young reporters, fresh out of school, hungry, angry and, for the most part, mainly concerned with keeping body and soul together. But we had fighting spirit and a vision for a new order where the company would share the profits we helped it to make and not just dole out benefits to a privileged few. The union did not ponder that it was strange that the government would help us foment and stage a strike, when to all concerned industrial harmony was the order of the day.
Some journalists, with hindsight, have told me when I set out to write this book that the SNUJ was made use of by the authorities to foster the government’s long-term objectives to control The Straits Times and the mass media. It was true that the relationship between then editor of The Straits Times, Leslie Hoffman, and Lee Kuan Yew, had always been acrimonious. And when Lee’s PAP came to power in 1959 with the formation of self-government, Hoffman relocated to Kuala Lumpur. He also transferred the editorial headquarters and much of the production team from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Mary Turnbull, who wrote Dateline Singapore, 150 Years of The Straits Times, noted that “the PAP leadership considered the paper failed to appreciate the political realities, with its expatriate management only interested in protecting business interests and making profits, while its local English-educated editorial executives were regarded as colonial stooges”.
It was against such an unpromising and bleak backdrop that many of my colleagues and I worked when we joined The Straits Times in the 60s. The daily editorial operations of the Singapore office of The Straits Times was managed by Wee Kim Wee, a noted journalist in his time who later rose to the highest position in the land as Singapore’s fourth president. He was of two minds when he interviewed me for the post of reporter in October 1968, saying: “I am not so sure you can do this job (I flunked his test when I could not recall the page one lead of The Straits Times the day of the interview) but they say you have the makings of a good writer (apparently, I did quite well in the written tests).’’ I wondered who “they” were, but never asked Wee as I was happy to have got a job that I liked, in what I thought then was a good company. How little did I know!
* Ong, who is 83 (at the time I started writing this book towards the end of 2011), has maintained a very low profile since he retired from politics in 1984 to make way for younger leaders. However, he displayed some unhappiness at the pace and manner in which he was sidelined from the political scene. Wikipedia records that Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister then, recognised Ong’s displeasure in a public letter of appreciation. “… I agree with you. You also had misgivings [about some newcomers], as had Chin Chye [deputy prime minister at one time], over the speed of selfrenewal and the effect it was having on the morale of the old guard MPs.”