Workers' Liberty

WHEN former CIA agent Bob Kiley ran London Underground, Ken Livingstone paid him £1 million a year.

When he left his job, in addition to receiving a £2.5 million severance payment, and continuing to live rent-free in a £2.3 million house in Belgravia, Kiley continued to “work” as a part-time consultant for £737,000 a year.

We say “work” not just because of his astronomically inflated salary, but because Kiley himself has now told the press: “I do very little work for my £737,000” (Evening Standard, 28 March).

Kiley is an emblem, a symbol of how the Tube is managed under Ken Livingstone, and of how “public sector” capitalism works in general. Needless to say, the generosity Livingstone has shown Kiley does not extend to his negotiations with the London Underground workforce.

On the same day as Bob Kiley’s confession to the Standard, the rail workers’ union RMT announced that more than 2,000 maintenance staff working for Tube infrastructure contractor Metronet will begin an overtime ban on Easter Monday, as part of a dispute over the forced transfer of staff to other companies. If the company does not resolve the dispute by 16 April, strike action will follow.

The votes were overwhelming for both strikes (92.6%) and action short of a strike (96.4%); the action will shut down large parts of the Tube network, as the company relies on overtime to keep its operations functioning.

Metronet, one of the private contractors also responsible for sub-contracting cleaning to firms who pay a mostly immigrant workforce as little as £5 an hour, promised a year ago that its workers on London Underground would not be transferred to its parent companies. This is a fight not just about preserving pay, conditions and organisation, but also preventing further fragmentation on the Tube.

It is another front in the war Transport for London, Tube management and the mayor are waging to break the RMT and create a pliant and cooperative workforce in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Despite the enormous and steadily mounting evidence, illusions that KenLivingstone is some kind of left-winger, that he is “red” or at least a bit pink, are still remarkably widespread — including on the left.

Solidarity thinks that Livingstone’s record on “big political” issues like anti-semitism, political Islam and Venezuela is, in fact, not left-wing at all. But we hope that, whatever disagreements on these questions exist, all working-class activists will agree that paying public sector fat cats millions of pounds while clashing with your workforce’s unions is not the mark of a socialist in power.

The fight for democracy and workers’ control in the public sector means a fight against all bureaucratic and management privileges — and a fight against the bourgeois politicians, like Livingstone, who create and sustain them.

Solidarity with the Metronet workers! — see www.workersliberty.org/twblog for regular updates.