It seems highly likely that tomorrow, June 10th 2009, there will be severe disruption on the London Underground system as a result of industrial action by the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers’ union (RMT). It is important that all Londoners understand the issues and get behind the RMT.
At the time of writing, RMT and London Underground are in talks with the conciliation service ACAS. There are always last minute negotiations with threatened tube strikes, and the outcome is always a cliff hanger. No wonder. Three million passengers use the tube every day. If the strike goes ahead £100 million in production could be lost.
There are actually three issues in the dispute. Though it’s presented in the press as just an argument about pay, there are other important issues involved. The first is the dispute that has already caused stoppages on the Victoria Line. It’s not just about dodgy doors, though that’s enough of a worry for passengers. It’s also about a culture of bullying and intimidation that is absolutely rife on London Underground.
The second issue is cuts. RMT suspects that up to 4,000 jobs could be scheduled to go. As usual management are playing their cards close to their chests. But it seems they’ve withdrawn their cast iron commitment of no compulsory redundancies.
What is the need for cuts? News buried in the financial pages a few days ago gives the clue. ‘Metronet fiasco costs taxpayer up to £410m’ was the one in The Telegraph on June 5th. Gordon Brown forced the then London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, to use a Public-Private Partnership (a form of Private Finance Initiative) to upgrade the underground. Predictably, the private consortium Metronet ran off with our money, leaving a huge hole in London Underground’s finances. Gordon Brown, whose expensive mistake caused this aggravation, is determined that underground workers and Londoners should pay for his stupidity. And London Underground management, in threatening to impose a cuts package of up to £2.4bn, are taking it out on the union and on Londoners.
The third issue is pay. A majority of workers this year are facing wage freezes. Some are being threatened with cuts in pay as the price for hanging on to their jobs. This is all part of a concerted attempt by the ruling class to make the workers pay for a crisis that is none of their making. They are using growing unemployment as a whip hand against employed workers. The tube workers are fighting back and we should support them for it.
Management seem to have deliberately provoked this strike. The eternal problem of industrial action on the underground is that the workers are divided into different unions, and management plays them off against each other. To completely paralyse the system the unions need to pull all the drivers out. But half of them are in the RMT and half in ASLEF. ASLEF head office is telling its members that it’s not their dispute. They are washing hands of the whole affair. But this is nonsense. All London Underground workers have a common interest in getting a decent wage claim. To achieve that, they need to work together.
Management originally offered a five year pay deal, with increases in the last three years a measly ½ % above inflation. In other words they want to tame the transport workers for a very long time. RMT, not surprisingly, thinks that’s a poor deal.
Management are particularly concerned to keep the unions quiet up to and including the London Olympics, at a time when the workers rightly feel they would have a lot of bargaining power.
What of the London Mayor, Boris Johnson? As a Tory he sees the need to put the boot into the tube workers, a militant and well organised section of the working class. The RMT are demanding that Boris “get out of the bunker,” but he knows whose side he’s on. Up to recently he’s kept his head down, but when push comes to shove he’ll support management all the way.
All tube workers need to combat the bullying that makes their work so stressful. And all Londoners should recognise that, if we want a more pleasant ride into work and around the City, our interests lie with the underground workers in resisting the cuts and not with penny-pinching management. All workers have an interest in smashing what is effectively a wage freeze, and should support the strikers accordingly. Let’s be clear. This dispute is down to management intransigence. They want to give the unions, all the unions, a bloody nose. The unions in turn must stick together in order to win.
