The battle to reinstate unjustly sacked RMT activist Arwyn Thomas has been victorious. LU has re-engaged him on a driver’s salary. We have set back, if not defeated, LU’s systematic program of sackings and victimisations.
Recollect the start of the year. Three sacked RMT reps: Peter Hartshorn, Eamonn Lynch and Arwyn Thomas. LU management were arrogant, almost fearless. They had spied a tired workforce, battered by the job cuts defeat, beaten down by the recession. They set out to pick off our reps, the glue that holds our trade unions together, hoping trade unionism on LU would begin to crumble. They thought our morale was so low that we would not fight back.
They did not expect what we threw back at them. It has been a fantastic campaign from start to finish. The reps at the centre of it have worked tirelessly and built up support from around the combine. It has been organised, energetic and has used public campaigning and even the anti-union press to the best possible advantage.
Tubeworker has argued for years that the union should fight disputes with a strategy focused on winning, with rank-and-file members in the driving seat and a willingness to take decisive action. Here are the main ingredients that contributed to the victory:
1. The action was escalated when it needed to be. Local, lined-based strikes on the Northern and Bakerloo lines had not reinstated Arwyn and Eamonn by February. The choice was: step up or give up. So our Executive member recommended that we stepped up to an all-drivers ballot, a call backed by members and reps. It was the first time a victimisation dispute had ever been taken beyond one workplace to across the whole company. The risk paid off. A ‘yes’ vote in the all-drivers ballot breathed new life into a campaign that had been wilting. As we say in Tubeworker, you put the strategy in place that maximises your chances of winning. Escalation was part of that winning strategy.
2. The rank-and-file train grades committee made decisions about how it thought the dispute should progress, and our Executive member took those decisions to the union's Executive. Tubeworker has often said that the people on the frontline know the job best and should be trusted with responsibility to make decisions about our own disputes. This produced a creative and effective strategy: the threat of 48 hours of strikes over five days. LU soon came crawling with an offer. Eamonn Lynch was reinstated; Arwyn was promised his job back (on which LU subsequently reneged). The strikes were suspended.
3. The industrial action was focused on winning. It was not token action. When RMT named the first set of strikes, it also named the second, so that management understood that they could not just tough out one set of strikes and expect us to go away. The strike dates initially named were 48 hours through one week in May, and another identical week of action in June. We weren’t bluffing. It was serious action, which we intended to carry out unless and until we won.
4. The union’s executive agreed to pay strike pay, to enable us to take prolonged action, and recognise that, especially after last year's strikes, some people were finding the financial hit hard. Again, putting the measures in place to enable us to win.
5. We kept going until we got our result. Management thought they had outsmarted us by reinstating Eamonn and offering to pay Arwyn off. They underestimated the determination of Arwyn Thomas, who turned down a six-figure sum, refusing to put a price on the head of a rep. Under pressure from reps, RMT’s executive voted to keep next week’s strikes on unless Arwyn was reinstated. While management and the Evening Standard were demanding the strikes were called off when Arwyn won his Tribunal, we insisted that the strike's aim was to secure his reinstatement, not a Tribunal win! We didn't blink, so they had to.
6. Legal decisions and negotiations with management need to be backed up with industrial action. Eamonn and Arwyn both won their employment tribunals, but the legal decision alone would not have won reinstatement for either. When management finally talked to the union about reinstatement, it was only because the threat of industrial action loomed.
There are a few strings to the settlement, as Arwyn will not return immediately to his driver's post, and the union will have to exhaust the disciplinary procedure before balloting for strikes on individual cases in future. But Arwyn can live with those strings, and our agreements with management already say we should exhaust the procedures first. A 100% win would have been better, but in the current circumstances, this is certainly a big win.
The working class is currently in a tough situation: in a recession, under a Tory government that is cutting everything we have ever fought for. But this dispute proves that, even in difficult times, victories are still possible if we use the right tactics and stick to our guns. It is a much-needed morale boost, and provides an excellent example, which will take us forward for future battles.