Next week’s strike action on Metronet is off, after RMT and the company reached a settlement. But the deal is a mixed bag.

By threatening to strike – and drivers threatening solidarity action on safety grounds – we have certainly won a much better position than we faced originally. But on the other hand, our ballot results showed that we had a lot of strength, and we could have used our strength more.

The main win is that ‘outsourcing’ will not go ahead as planned ie. Metronet staff will not be transferred to the employment of Bombardier. This is a good win, as every transfer of employment makes the workforce more fragmented and staff more vulnerable. Instead, there will be a trial on the Central Line of an alternative to outsourcing – fleet workers will continue to employed and managed by Metronet, but Bombardier will govern the technical specifications of the job.

Tubeworker’s alarm bells were set ringing by the boast that the deal avoids compulsory redundancies. Hang on, didn’t we win that guarantee in 2001? If you need to rehash stuff we won nearly five years ago, then maybe the deal is not as good as it might be.

The deal sees Metronet agree to a ‘commission’ to review its decision to exclude new starters from the TfL Pension Fund (as well as restoring some people to the Fund who should never have been removed from it in the first place). That’s a fudge. Commissions are generally a mechanism for kicking an issue into the long grass, only for it to come back quietly when management feel more confident to get their own way.

This is a difficult issue to win in isolation, as it mainly affects future workers rather than existing ones. That is why it was a good move to include it alongside other issues in our dispute, and why it is a mistake now to isolate it again.

Every time that a company excludes a group of workers – even future workers – from the TfL Pension Fund, it undermines the Fund as a whole. So management can set about the piecemeal erosion of the Fund, and if the union keeps on deciding that it is too small or to difficult to fight, then before long, the whole Fund – and all its members - will suffer.

Metronet workers still face a fight. The crucial issue is the Central Line trial. What are the criteria? How and by whom will its ‘success’ be judged? This trial is prone to being scuppered by management, who will be looking to interpret it in their own interests. We need to make sure that our union reps are all over this trial like a rash, making sure that management can not fiddle the figures or manipulate the results, and that our working conditions and the safety of the railway are at the forefront.