Solidarity Forever?

This flyer was spotted at a train crew depot on the Underground in the midst of industrial action by RMT drivers. It is a deliberate attempt to undermine strike action, shamefully doing the bosses' dirty work for them.

Off The Rails believes it is unofficial, and hopes that ASLEF nationally will disavow it and that local ASLEF branches will not accept in to membership any RMT driver whilst their dispute continues. We understand the ASLEF leadership on LU has a different policy to the RMT regarding the company's compressed-working-week proposal. But respecting picket lines is, or should be, the closest thing we have to a religious principle in the labour movement. This applies even if you don't necessarily fully agree with the aims of a strike. To launch a local recruitment campaign explicitly targeting strikebreakers is shameful. Workers who join a union on the explicit basis that they don't want to strike will not be solid, and will general yo-yo between unions when one goes into dispute to avoid having to take action. Is this the kind of person we want in ASLEF?

It wasn’t long ago that the union used to include in the members diary the following words: “It has long been the tradition in ASLEF to respect picket lines whether they are our own or those of fellow trade unionists.” The wording of that page has been watered down a bit since then but a strong response to this obvious attempt at strike breaking would go some way to restating the union’s commitment to the principle of solidarity.

A mainline driver writes:

"Like most mainline passenger drivers in the UK, I am very proud of my union's recent campaign of strike action for a reasonable pay rise from 2022-2024. I am especially proud that as a small union of just over twenty thousand members we also more or less single-handedly defeated the Tories disgraceful anti-strike Minimum Service Levels legislation with the mere threat of increased strike action concurrently with that dispute. Like many ASLEF branches around the country, my branch produced our own badge for members commemorating that strike campaign. During that campaign, the union proudly struck alongside other public sector unions over the Tory government's attempt to enforce outrageously low pay settlements on workers struggling with the cost of living crisis.

"So imagine the outrage I felt when via social media I was forwarded a photo of this poster bearing my union's logo. Apparently some ASLEF members working on LUL think striking is a bad thing and want to sell our union as the non-strike union to members of RMT taking action in their depots. We have a four letter word for people who leave their union and come to work on strike days during a dispute: scab. In ASLEF, we despise that conduct... at least, we do on the main line, I had always assumed the same was true on the Underground. And yet here I sit, reading a poster that suggests we actively want to encourage more of them and recruit them to our union.

"I don't believe that that poster would have been sanctioned had it been sent to the General Secretary for authorisation of the use of the union's logo, as it should have been, and therefore constitutes an unofficial circular. Whoever is responsible for it has brought the union into disrepute and should be disciplined accordingly.

"Finally, I find it particularly grating that whoever authored that poster chose to quote the statistic about 96% of train drivers being members of ASLEF. Whoever that person is, I am quite sure that they know that the proportion of London Underground drivers that are members of ASLEF has been falling for some time, with just under half now holding RMT membership. Perhaps they should spend more time thinking about why that is, instead of producing and distributing garbage like this and bringing shame on the rest of us."