RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

8 | denis beckett
about the job. I heard it was supposed to be fast-track stuff.
I heard that the track started with administering the supply
of furniture and buying the boss’s rugby tickets. Not for
me, thanks. But then came the sixth and last part of the job
description: responsibility for personnel matters relating to the
african staff. Now this could be something.
It was. The “black affairs” portfolio at the time was rock
bottom in the status stakes but grist to my mill. Here were 300
real lives, unenfranchised lives, in a ready-made test-tube of
justice and equity.
Personnel was an astonishingly free-wheeling terrain in
the early 70s and The Star’s wheel wheeled freer than most. I
could do anything that I could persuade two people: Hal Miller,
the manager, and Jolyon Nuttall, his deputy, to swallow. Both
were sporting characters though Hal occasionally chopped me
down for “too much too soon” (the prevailing antidote to the
prevailing cliché “too little too late”). When Hal stepped on the
brake he stepped with a heavy foot, but at heart he was a hewho-hesitates-is-lost
man rather than a look-before-you-leap
man, and my time under him was a time of leaping.
Leaping, for one, into elected employee representation. It’s
hard to believe now, but this was minefield stuff. The revolution
wanted trade unions, which the government would not allow,
while the government had its own structure of approved
committees that the revolution treated as treason.
I wanted to address the standard management wail of not
knowing what the workers’ gripes were until they blew out. I
figured that the more freely people could elect representatives,
and the more freely those representatives could speak, the
better. and there was nothing in law that said – not loud and
clear, anyway – that african employees may not pick someone
to talk to management. I put it to Jolyon, he said great. We put it
to Hal. Hal asked what other companies were doing this thing.
I said none that I know of.
I saw Hal wrestling. Jolyon said “is that a good reason to
deflect us?” Hal looked at him with a eureka expression and