Workers' Liberty

The unions made several mistakes during the course of the casualisation dispute, which meant that they were able only to slow management’s attacks rather than stop them completely. It is worth assessing these mistakes – not through bitterness or negativity, but because only by identifying mistakes can we ensure that we do not repeat them.

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Kept In The Dark

Throughout this dispute, ordinary members felt that we did not get enough information from our unions. Workers find it particularly unsatisfactory when we find out information from management – or even from newspapers – rather than from our own unions.

As the campaign gradually came to life, more and more rank-and-file union reps and activists produced leaflets. But this was not matched by head office, and we were left wondering: if the rank and file had not produced our own leaflets, would anything have come out at all?

Too much management propaganda went unanswered. The unions need to have a ‘rapid response unit’ that replies point-by-point to what management put out.

After taking a decision on a Thursday to call a strike starting ten days later, RMT did not mail its own members until the following week. Most members got the letter on the next Thursday, the very day that the union called the strike off!

If the unions do not keep up a constant flow of accurate information, rumours and misinformation spread.

It was good to see an issue of a new RMT regional council newsletter in the run-up to the (non-) strike, hot on the heels of the regional council electing a new leadership. Let's hope it's the first of a regular publication, keeping members informed, telling people how to get involved and telling different grades about the issues that affect each other and us all.

Dragging Feet

Management and the unions knew about the transfer of Silverlink stations to LUL in December 2006. LUL management had their own problems getting information from Silverlink’s management, who were sore at losing the franchise, but obviously saw an opportunity to import dodgy working practices from the private mainline and use them to undermine established practices on the public London Underground.

As Tubeworker advocated at the time, the unions should have gone to management with proactive demands for the staffing of the transferring stations and the rights of their staff. This would have forced management to show their hand over their plans for agency labour and mobile supervision and would have put them on the back foot. As it was, it appears that union reps simply attended Joint Working Party meetings and listened to what management were willing to tell them. It was not until the eve of the transfer that management revealed their plans for agency and security staff and mobile supervision, and the unions were finally able to sound the alarm.

Even then, union head offices dragged their feet. For example, RMT stations reps continually called for a campaign to alert members of all grades to the issues and convince them of the need to fight back. Such a campaign was not forthcoming – at least, it did not happen as promptly or as effectively as it should have done.

Tubeworker believes that the unions should have declared a dispute earlier, and should have kicked the ballot off sooner too – at the start of the new year would have been best. But there was a myth at large that if you delay, it gives you more chance to convince members. While this does have a certain logic to it, things work in the opposite direction too: the longer a union delays, the more it seems to members that the issues at stake are not actually that important after all.

On top of that, management took advantage of the delay by throwing in a few extra attacks, adding to the perils for the unions inherent in a multi-demand, ‘shopping-list’ dispute.
By the time TSSA’s ballot finished, RMT’s had still not even started. This and other things left many RMT activists feeling that their union was ‘tailing’ the TSSA.

Acting As An All-Grades Union?

Tubeworker takes an indepth look at this issue here.

Ballots Mis-Matched

Lack of co-ordination between the two unions’ ballots meant that by the time RMT finally sent out ballot papers, it had to close the ballot less than two weeks later to make sure that its strike mandate started before TSSA’s expired. The balloting period was too short – and had two bank holidays in the middle of it! This seriously affected people’s opportunity to vote, which meant that a very healthy majority (83%) was spoiled by an embarrassingly low turnout (about one quarter).

Lack of ballot co-ordination also meant that the period of time between TSSA’s mandate expiring and RMT’s going live was so short as to give little room for the unions to manoeuvre. No wonder management repeatedly refused TSSA’s request to extend the deadline for their mandate – the company wouldn’t let them delay strike action because they (rightly) calculated that this would push them into calling it off.

There were other organisational problems too. TSSA forgot to ballot its service control members; RMT overlooked balloting the ex-Silverlink staff for an as-yet-unexplained reason.

Wanted: Strategic Thinking

There was not enough strategic thinking, for example about the timing and length of the strike. Unions make decisions about how and when to strike in a very top-down way. National Executives make the decisions. Each rail union’s National Executive has only one representative from the London Transport region, who may not even be from the company or grade(s) involved in the strike.

Decisions about strikes should be made by the workers involved. More than that, they should be made through a process of thinking, talking and considering options for the strategies and tactics available to us. Had this happened in this dispute, we may well have opted not for a 72-hour strike starting on a Sunday but for something more effective instead. For example, Tubeworker would prefer to have seen two 24-hour strikes in one week (say, on a Tuesday and Thursday) than the 72-hour Sunday-start strike – it would have been just as effective in terms of disruption (if not more so), and easier for workers to bear in terms of lost wages.

Hardship Payments

The unions were right to recognise that the 24-hour strike is an ineffective gesture best consigned to the past. But having taken the bold move of calling us out for 72 hours, they should have offered hardship payments to members who might have genuinely struggled financially. Tubeworker has argued previously for the benefits of hardship payments. One issue is that in a shiftwork industry like ours, some workers would have lost three days’ pay, some nothing at all – a hardship fund, to which those who did not lose much could contribute, would have been a way to even out the sacrifice.