Workers' Liberty

Rail workers know that our employers will risk life and limb (ours, not theirs!) to keep the trains running and the cash coming in. We can not trust them to protect us at work - we have to rely on ourselves.

EWS is being taken over by the German state owned operator DB. At a recent meeting Transnet (the German rail union) briefed ASLEF on the implications for EWS. As Tosh McDonald (ASLEF vice president) reports, any existing management that doesn’t fit in with how Railion (DB’s railfreight group) run things is quickly shown the door. This has then been followed by workforce cuts and reductions in locations.

A month before the end of the franchise, ASLEF is balloting its members on Central Trains for industrial action.

86.9% of drivers at Midland Mainline have voted for strike action to force the company to enhance pension provision in line with previous pay improvements. ASLEF’s executive has named a series of one day strikes every Thursday for six weeks starting on 25 October.

The working class needs a voice in politics. Labour used to go some way to being a workers’ party: it had workers in it, unions could vote on and make policy at Labour conference.

Unions and local Labour Parties have voted to ban themselves from submitting motions on current political issues to Labour Party conference. All the formal powers that conference once held to determine party policy will be transferred to the leadership, which will only have to ‘consult’ with the National Policy Forum, itself a well-controlled and largely impermeable body. These proposals have finished off Labour Party conference as a serious political event. They are an attempt to finally destroy the Labour Party as a democratic political organisation based on the labour movement.

A member of RMT’s LU Engineering branch explains why it has relaunched the CFDU (Campaign for a Fighting Democratic Union)

As we write, the Communication Workers’ Union postworkers' dispute looks set to end with a deal that gives Royal Mail virtually everything they want.

Between 50 and 60% cent of the population identify as ‘working class’. Despite the term ‘working class’ vanishing completely from the language of the Labour Party, the proportion claiming this now-unspoken identity has been fairly stable since the 1950s.

To be working class is to be at one pole of a pair. The other pole is the capitalist class.

Metronet

Infrastructure consortium Metronet is in administration. Metronet workers held solid strike action, backed by other grades of Tube workers, and forced guarantees.

RMT’s Executive is consulting about the constituencies from which delegates to the union’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) are chosen.

It is now five years since Network Rail replaced Railtrack – so why are workers still stuck on different terms and conditions according to which company or region you worked in half a decade ago?!