The cleaners grade meeting on Friday 25th July agreed that we will need more strikes to win the strike demands for all cleaners. The dates have now been set: from 05:30 on Thursday 21 until 05:29 on Saturday 23 August. Concrete proposals for the next strikes include targeted mass picketing on lines with a concentration of activists, eg. the Central, Piccadilly and Northern lines. All agreed that we need a renewed campaign to motivate and convince people as the next strikes approach.

The good news is that RMT will now make hardship payments to striking cleaners.

The delay from the proposed early August strikes are justified if we use that time to build a winning strategy. But the time we buy will also be used by the companies to victimise and suspend people and diminish our numbers. And are we forming a strategy?

Cleaners’ confidence has been shaken as they have watched their colleagues get suspended since the first strikes and not seen the union fight assertively for these people. It will be difficult to convince people to strike again if they feel cannot get their jobs back if the bosses come for them about their National Insurance numbers. The union has produced letters to write to the companies, questioning the reason for suspensions, and it wants people with ‘correct’ NI numbers to come forward to challenge the suspensions as race discrimination or victimisation for trade union activity. But the union doesn’t claim it can stop NI checks, it can only frustrate them.

If the employers are attacking us on every front, we need to fight on every front. If the law says there’s not much we can do, we must do something anyway. These laws are written to create unchallenged enslavement. If we don’t challenge them when they are used against us, we will be guilty of knowingly organising a strike where illegal workers were likely to be picked off and washing our hands of defending those members when the inevitable happens. If you organise them, organise to defend them! It is the only way we will be able to carry on fighting to win this strike.

The leadership talked of building a political campaign to question whether there should be such a thing as an illegal worker, but this did not seem a matter of urgency. It would be welcome if they would fight politically, as the silence on this front so far has been deafening. But for the bosses, the industrial battle is inseparable from the political. For them, there is no ‘meanwhile’. There is no alternative to us fighting the immigration attacks now.

We need a rank-and-file controlled campaign that will fight to defend every single job that has been lost. We need to extend individual suspension battles into a general, collective, political battle over the way the employers are trying to crush this strike. The strike committee needs to get legal advice that will aid a collective battle against the basis of the immigration crack down. The Campaign Against Immigration Controls is planning about organising some direct action, and Brent Trades Council has organised a meeting to build a campaign for one sacked rep. These initiatives are a start.