Workers' Liberty

The phoney war is over - now for the real thing.

Faced with two resolutions from the RMT London Transport Regional Council - one which demanded a ballot to bring Metronet immediately under TfL control and the other a demand for a campaign to lobby politicians and pursue guarantees over pensions etc - the RMT leadership opted for option two.

The reasons for this are on the face of it quite obvious. Firstly it stayed within the law thus protecting the union [the properties, funds, full-time positions and salaries, not the living organism composed of our brothers and sisters you understand].

Secondly the self-appointed vanguards who compose much of the leadership are inherently distrustful of the working class. You see these gents [the exec and above are all men] are under the misapprehension that they are the only ones capable of considering political decisions such as re-nationalisation - ordinary workers they believe are only interested in bread-and-butter issues such as pensions, transfers and possible job cuts.

I believe that this is a gross error of judgement: not only do most Metronet workers want to work for a public company but the material benefits of doing so ie. a TfL pension and free travel for workers and their families are even more prominent than Lezal and co's incompetence.

Even members of the left who should know better argued for option two, claiming that once workers went on strike they would then automaticaly begin to fight for renationalisation. Some of us pointed out that this had not happened during previous privatisations when we fought under the cover of health and safety in the campaign against Tube privatisation and lost. Far from becoming more militant workers were worn down by one- and two-day actions which did not raise the demand that we should stike to stay in the public sector.

Sometimes it is necessary to go through the process with workers to prove in practice that our ideas are correct but if we continually go at the pace of the slowest runner we will all finish last [particularly galling is that some of the slower ones actually belong to avowedly Marxist groups].

Without wishing to resemble a broken record [old CD for those under 30], I think that it has now been shown beyond any doubt that to bring Metronet back in house and to protect the East London line from privateering sharks we must act as an industrial union and break the anti-union laws. Our leaders have been campaigning against these laws for over 15 years and are only too well aware that they will be repealed only when they are actually broken on the ground. It is high time to put up or shut up before the campaign becomes an absolute parody of how it began.

So then the phoney war is over the 3 items the RMT chose to fight over - pensions, job cuts and transfers - have seemingly been resolved as we guessed they would, and the privatisation juggernaut still rumbles on though perhaps with new drivers, as we said it would. The question is now that we've fought one we knew we would win, do we have the courage to fight one we may lose i.e fight for complete renationalisation?

To take on this fight we need to break the anti-union laws. Our movement has a history of opposing unjust laws, the Tolpuddle Martyrs being the most obvious example [without whom unions may not now exist]. As our elected leader is fond of saying, there is no guarantee of victory if you fight, but there's the certainty of defeat if you don't. Let's have the courage to fight and win.