Strikes Suspended As Management Begin To Back Down

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

RMT and TSSA have suspended this weeks strike after management agreed some concessions. The Daily Mail's website headlined, "48-hour Tube strike is called off as London Underground caves to militants and agrees not to close all ticket offices."

The agreement commits management to putting the implementation of Fit For The Future - Stations on hold, including HR1 and Section 188 notices that carried the threat of redundancies. Those concessions are real and positive. However, there are no definite, specific commitments to back down on the proposals - so what we do next is crucial.

LUL have committed to a station-by-station review of ticket office closures, with the explicit proviso that this may result in some of them remaining open. A two-month discussion period, ending on 4 April, has been announced, and the terms of the deal specify that the proposals could be subject to change during that time. That too is significant: before the strike, Tube bosses and Boris Johnson were talking about the cuts plans as a fait accompli that couldn’t possibly, under any circumstances, be changed - and, unfortunately but understandably, many Tube workers believed that too. The Mayor and the management have been forced to back down from that intransigence by the solid strike last week, and the confidence of the workforce has received a big boost. The Mayor repeatedly called the strike "pointless"; and the company's mantra was "striking achieves nothing". That has been dramatically disproved.

TSSA was more eager to settle than the RMT, and some activists in the RMT felt that members would not have been prepared to take further, sustained action once a deal representing progress had been offered. Keeping the strikes on with this deal on the table would certainly have been a risk.

However, suspending the action is risky too. The danger now is that over the two-month period, the pressure comes off management, the issue falls out of the headlines, management have time to recover the ground they lost through the 4-6 February strike. Unions may stop communicating with their members, and officers and activists may retreat into “business as usual” mode.

To make the most of the concessions forced from management, our unions must take some immediate concrete steps:

  • declare now that we will strike for three (or more) days in early April - talks only bring progress when the threat of strikes looms, and announcing April strikes would signal to both members and management that if the talks do not yield meaningful progress, action will restart and escalate
  • declare some bottom lines in the talks, such as no reduction in staffing levels, no introduction of a two-tier workforce through re-grading, and keeping a trained supervisor on every station
  • be open and spread the word about what is happening in talks: make daily reports to members and show us all documentation.
  • working with campaigns like Hands off London Transport, mobilise Londoners to defend their station staff and ticket offices, using the “station-by-station review” as an opportunity to get service users to demand their ticket offices stay open.
  • systematically visit every workplace and speak to every member of staff
  • hold branch meetings as often as they have been over the last six weeks
  • build hardship funds to sustain serious action in April, both in branches and in the national union
  • bring other TfL companies into dispute - particularly Tube Lines, where management have revealed their intention to pay for equal pensions and passes with job cuts.

The suspension of the action is not a sell out, but whether it has bought unions time to push for greater concessions from management depends very much on what unions do now. This is not the end of the dispute, just the end of the beginning! The stakes remain high, and victory remains possible.

Comments

Submitted by Tubeworker on Sun, 16/02/2014 - 15:09

Tubeworker hears that RMT's Central Line East branch has passed policy similar to the one advocated in this article.

It's vital that union branches pass such policies to create some pressure from below and make sure that the dispute doesn't fizzle out during the negotiation period.

When's your next branch meeting? Could your branch pass similar policy too?

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