Cleaners' Victory: A 'Tubeworker' Assessment

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

RMT cleaners have achieved an important success - the 'London living wage' for all Tube cleaners. It was won by brave and determined efforts by a vulnerable section of workers and their supporters, and should inspire and provide an example for others.

This has been a campaign of perhaps historic importance, so it deserves a thorough assessment. We have to identify shortcomings as well as strengths so that we can learn for the future. The result is not a full success, and the union's campaign was not perfect.

A Living Wage?

All cleaners on Metronet contracts will receive the London living wage - currently reckoned at £7.45 per hour - from the start of September. Cleaners on TubeLines contracts (ie. working for ISS) will get a 60p per hour rise from 1 September, then incremental increases until they reach the full £7.45 by April next year. Although this is still inadequate, poverty-level pay, it is a significant (30+%) increase on the paltry, £5.50-ish per hour they are on now. It is a big win for cleaners and for RMT.

However, concerns have arisen about ISS's commitment to actually deliver the full rise, as the contractor is apparently saying that they don't know where the money is coming from. Our reply should be: that's your problem - we've won the pay rise, now you deliver it. TubeLines, who contract the cleaning to ISS, should simply take cleaning away from ISS and in-house should ISS waver about this. In fact, it should do that anyway!

As one cleaner said, '60p is a disgusting amount to be offered. It will get swallowed up by inflation and the tax man.' This is compounded by the untrustworthiness of ISS. TubeLines cleaners, sadly, were left alone. Metronet cleaners had a straightforward win so were out of the picture, and the union reined in the TubeLines engineering staff. Most blame goes to the companies for their dirty divisive tricks. But some blame must go to the RMT for not being a bit more smart.

Moreover, there has been no solid progress on the other demands of the strike - more holidays, better sick pay, a decent pension, an end to the scandal of 'third party sackings'. Still, we live to fight another day for these - they are proactive demands for improvements, rather than defensive demands to fight off an immediate attack, and we should get back to fighting for them as soon as possible.

Organising To Win

This summer's strikes came on the back of years of organising work. Historically, cleaners have always been in the RMT's predecessor unions, as cleaning was seen as a core railway activity. When cleaning was contracted-out, unionisation levels plummeted, as they have done right across the public sector when particular services are handed over to private cowboys.

But while some people argued that cleaners - by now mainly immgrant, female and super-exploited - were therefore too hard to organise, others were not put off, and organising efforts reaped benefits.

Crucially, RMT organised the cleaners into an all-grades union, where they benefited from being in the same union as the people who drive the trains and staff the stations that they clean. More experienced reps from other grades were able to represent cleaners in trouble and to coach cleaners to be reps themselves. Union members on stations and in depots were on hand to take up cleaners' grievances and at times to directly challenge their bullying managers. All this helped build the momentum towards the strike action. The Living Wage victory for cleaners is a vindication of the all-grades, industrial union approach.

At the same time, though, the T&G (now part of Unite) put lots of resources and professional organisers into persuading cleaners to join a different union. While a significant number joined them, when the real test came with RMT's ballot this year - a chance for the two rival unions to combine their strength - the T&G sat it out, and even wrote to its cleaner members on the eve of the strike advising them to go to work! The T&G did then ballot, and was to strike alongside RMT this week, but at the crucial stage of this struggle, they were not just absent but on the wrong side.

The cleaners' victory shows that the most effective union organising strategies are those that focus on supporting workers to fight for and win key workplace demands, rather than professional organisers getting people to fill in membership forms.

In the ballot and the strike, RMT activists put in hundreds and hundreds of hours of hard work talking and listening to cleaners, who then delivered a fantastic, 99+% Yes vote for action. Similar work was then put in to making the action as effective as possible, although it was marred by a certain level of disorganisation which frustrated many activists.

The strike action itself was well-supported by cleaners, but undermined by some patchiness in support, the actions of the T&G, and the employers' use of agency staff, supplied by agencies which were probably acting illegally in doing so, and which snuck people into work hidden in vans with blacked-out windows.

The three days of strike action were a massive sacrifice for cleaners already on rubbish money, and the union was slow to respond to rank-and-file calls for payments to strikers to ease the hardship.

On a positive note, the strike attracted some exciting solidarity protest actions from groups such as Feminist Fightback, the Campaign Against Immigration Controls and Brent Trades Council, whose support boosted striking cleaners' morale as well as gaining much-needed publicity and putting pressure on the companies. Workers' Liberty members are active in all these groups, and took the initiative in proposing they take action in support on the cleaners.

No Settlement Unless No Victimisations

The strikes have been suspended rather than settled, but it is not clear what the strategy is from head office about what happens next. Either they think the offer is good enough to put to the members - unlikely if it doesn't actually guarantee the London living wage - or they have hopes of more progress at the further talks planned for early September. But what will these produce without impending industrial action?

Crucially, RMT has always prided itself on never settling disputes while there are outstanding victimisations against members. There have been many victimisations in this dispute, and the union needs to put its principles into action. Companies that were happy to employ cleaners without regular immigration status when they were quietly accepting crap wages and conditions and making profits for their employers suddenly started using immigration law to bash cleaners when they started to stand up for themselves. While the union is rightly taking action to demand the reinstatement of sacked station staff Jerome Bowes, Sarah Hutchins and Mo Makboul, it can not ignore the plight of its sacked cleaners' reps and activists.

The sad truth is that the union did not act quickly and decisively enough when these victimisations happened, officials giving the impression that they thought that there was nothing they could do. There was plenty they could have done - for example, getting prompt and supportive legal advice and representation from immigration solicitors (rather than their usual employment solicitors). It could have organised protest actions rather than leaving it to outside supporters to do so.

One reason that the union was not really in a position to continue striking for even greater victories was that many cleaners feared being victimised without being effectively defended by the union, as their workmates had been. A further strike in the current situation could well have seen a lot of cleaners go to work, and those that stayed out sacked or deported, a personal horror for them and gutting the union of its key activists.

By refusing to settle this dispute until the victimisations are resolved, RMT can start to industrially challenge the companies' use of National Insurance number checks to engineer dismissals. The union could also run a positive campaign for papers for Tube cleaners ie. for everyone to have regularised legal status. We doubt that the companies want to deport their entire workforce, so we may be in more of a position of strength around NI numbers than we think, if only the union would take it up.

The unions' decision to suspend action may have been right, but there are problems with the way it happened. RMT's Exective should have waited until the strike committee had discussed the offer before deciding. But it the Executive took its decision and brought down a piece of paper with their resolution to suspend. The strike committee felt despondent - not outraged, but not happy either.

The Strong Helping The Weak?

We have already pointed out that being part of an industrial, all-grades union has been crucial to the cleaners' success.

However, the union did not in practice make maximum use of this, not doing enough to encourage and support refusal to work on the grounds of safety on the strike days. Operational staff have done this very effectively in the past both for their own issues and for other striking workers such as the Metronet strikers last year. Although it is perhaps easier to claim grounds for safety concerns when engineers are unavailable than when cleaning is sub-standard, it is still possible, and it seems that there may be an additional problem of some LUL staff not seeing cleaners as their workmates as much as they do Infraco staff.

We should learn the lesson that general exhortations and circulation of rights information is worthwhile, but is no substitute for being in the workplace, identifying the safety concerns and acting decisively.

Urging solidarity through the slogan 'the strong helping the weak' is also problematic. On the one hand, it is undoubtedly true that some grades have stronger organisation and more industrial muscle than others, and should be persuaded to help out their colleagues. But on the other hand, 'the strong helping the weak' risks labelling some grades as 'weak', as though that could never change, so making them feel less confident and encouraging pity rather than respect from other grades. We need solidarity not charity of well-organised to less well-organised workers.

What Next?

So what next? Cleaners have achieved significant success, but this is not over. The strike committee plans to hold a mass meeting next week to re-group. The union needs a strong industrial strategy to support the cleaners.

While the cleaners may now be ignored by those who only pay attention when workers walk out, rank-and-file activists and the union leadership have as much work to do as ever. The leadership needs to wake up and fight over the victimisations, and to improve its support work on immigration issues. It needs to provide the resources to activists to get round every workplace talking and listening to cleaners, explaining our successes and the tasks that still face us, both of which point to the need to join and get active in the union.

Tubeworker topics
Trade Unions

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