83% of us have voted ‘Yes’ to going on strike. But we will have to do the ballot again. What’s happened?
Management’s pay offer has not changed one bit. They are still offering 1% this year and RPI only for the next four years until after the Olympics. The days are counting down for people who face losing their jobs. The issues we are fighting about have not gone away.
What’s ‘happened’ is the ‘anti-union’ laws. London Underground has declared that the ballot we held was ‘illegal’. Did the union do anything wrong? How has the RMT broken the law? One example is that the RMT said they were balloting ‘Blackhorse Road Group’. LU’s legal challenge said , ‘Blackhorse Road Group consists of five separate stations with five separate addresses’. Under the law, unions need to give employers the details of work locations. This, and other similar trivialities, is apparently enough under the law, to declare our ballot illegal.
Seems flimsy, pathetic, trivial? It is. But these laws are designed to give the employers such flimsy reasons to prevent strikes. Margaret Thatcher wrote the first anti union laws in the ‘80s to smash the workers movement. The particular law that we have been caught by was drawn up by New Labour, who have continued to tie unions up in law that makes it virtually impossible to take strike action.
It would be great to think that when we are faced with laws as unjust as this, that we would have the confidence to say ‘To hell with it’, and go on strike anyway. There is a tradition of taking unofficial strike action on the Underground. But the union’s leadership had already taken the decision that we would ballot again. We did not have the option to say we would go ahead with the strike.
So, in this strike ballot, we will show them that the reasons for our fight have not changed and we are still determined to fight. If they will not listen to our demands over jobs, pay and management bullying, we still have no choice but to take strike action. A strike is something they obviously fear. Otherwise they would not have dragged in the lawyers.
We will vote yes again, but who is to say we will not find ourselves facing another legal challenge in a few weeks? We will not be tied for legal reasons from ever standing up for ourselves again. We are part of a union because it means we can take action and win more together than we ever could do alone. If we stand together – even if a legal challenge faces us next time – then there will be very little they can do to stop us taking action. E.g. Visteon, Oil Refineries.
