Workers' Liberty

Through our unions, Tube workers have slowed London Underground’s drive to casualise our job - but if the unions had avoided mistakes, they could have stopped it in its tracks. For the first time, TSSA joined RMT in balloting for strikes. And RMT took the right step in calling an all-grades ballot. Members voted by over 80% to strike; the Executives called a 72-hour stoppage. (ASLEF, true to form, sat it out repeating the nonsense mantra that ‘these issues don’t affect drivers’.)

This pressure forced LUL to: scrap plans for mobile supervisors; withdraw a new, weaker procedure for ‘refusal to work on safety grounds’; improve protection for signallers whose jobs are to be scrapped; and back down onsome other attacks too.

But we judge management’s position not on how much it has changed, but on what it says. It leaves ex-Silverlink stations without supervisors overnight, private security guards patrolling the stations instead. It leaves the ticket office cuts sure to come back another day; does not give a satisfactory result in the Bakerloo detrainment dispute; will not end the chaos and unfairness in the promotions system; and has several other flaws.

The unions needed to reject this offer and continue fighting it. But they called off strike action, not just because of the progress achieved, but because they feared that they could not deliver a solid strike. TSSA remains a union that has not taken strike action on the Tube since 1926.

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RMT made mistakes too. Firstly, members felt ill-informed. With management pumping out propaganda, it was vital the union gave members up-to-date information on developments and issues. But with head offices leaving this to rank-and-file activists, workers often did not know what was going on, finding things out from the press rather than our own unions.

Secondly, although balloting all grades was the right decision, it was taken rather late in the campaign, so the head-in-the-sand sectionalism promoted by ASLEF had a headstart amongst drivers before RMT started chasing after it. It is wrong that station staff ready to fight were held back by perceived reluctance from other grades.

Thirdly, the unions made organisational errors. eg. RMT’s balloting period was so short that only a quarter of members voted.

Nonetheless, the action could and should have continued, perhaps in a different form, such as two 24-hour strikes in one week rather than a 72-hour strike starting on a Sunday. But TSSA reps voted to call off the action, and then a majority of RMT reps took the same view (but without a vote).

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Management will come back with more attacks, the most certain being the ticket office cuts. Several issues are now in ‘working groups’, which LUL will use to sneak in their attacks again and demobilise our opposition. And we are already in the run-up to the next pay claim. So the unions must learn from these mistakes. Or we will be in the same place in a year’s time, holding back a tide of cuts and casualisation but conceding a few more points because we still think we are not strong enough.

Why do management attack Tube workers? Because they can. They are training managers in union-busting strategies because they know that if they can break our unions, there will be nothing to stop them doing exactly what they want to us and out jobs. These are not the old days any more; the people running LUL now are serious players who won’t give up at the first sign of a one-day strike.

The big question is: Are we still able to defend and advance our conditions in this new climate? We need to rethink our tactics and strategy in our ongoing battle to secure the best possible working conditions.

We should consider new tactics such as hardship payments to workers who struggle financially with strikes; imaginative forms of industrial action; and stronger links with the wider trade union movement and public. Crucially, decisions about strikes must be taken by the workers involved: after all, we would probably make better decisions!

Management have taken their first step along the casualisation road - but the unions’ (albeit flawed) fightback at least prevented that step from becoming a leap.