The Last Great Strike

Veteran journalist Clement Mesenas looks back on eight eventful days in 1971 when a group of young reporters staged a historic strike that shut down The Straits Times, a company that had the proud tradition of never being off the streets in its 120 years of existence, not even during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. “Clement has written a cracker of a book. Even if you don’t love that national 

institution called The Straits Times, he tells a gripping tale of idealism, bravado and table-banging drama featuring indignant young journalists who take their battle against their parsimonious, disdainful, white-dominated Straits Times management to the streets two days before Christmas in 1971.”

Tan Wang Joo, former editor of The Sunday Nation, and a deputy editor of The Straits Times.

“It is more than a strike story. The writer’s account of newsroom life in pre-computer days should interest news junkies and those who care about the media industry.”  Cheong Yip Seng, Singapore ambassador to Chile and former editor-in-chief of the        English and Malay Newspapers Division of Singapore Press Holdings


Clement Mesenas started his career in The Straits Times in 1968 as a young crime reporter. He was branch union chairman and secretary-general of the Singapore National Union of Journalists. He also co-founded the Asean Confederation of Journalists. He left Singapore in 1979 for assignments abroad at the Kuwait Times (managing editor) and Gulf News, Dubai (deputy editor) where he covered the Iran-Iraq war, the Beirut civil war and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. He returned to Singapore in 2000 to join MediaCorp, where he was a pioneering editor of the TODAY newspaper. He retired in 2011 and now works at developing social media platforms.