Industrial news in brief

Submitted by Matthew on 15 November, 2017 - 12:44 Author: Gemma Short and Peggy Carter

Members of train drivers’ union Aslef working for GTR Southern voted to accept the deal recommended by their leadership to settle their long-running dispute over Driver Only Operation.

The headline pay increase looks impressive at first — 28.5% over five years, with a minimum of a 2.5% increase (or more if RPI is higher than 2.5%) in the last year of the deal, bringing the basic pay to a big-sounding £63k. However, even working on a very conservative assumption that the union secures RPI-level increases over that period, and that RPI runs at an average of 3%, the element of the deal that compensates the drivers for taking on the train dispatch and other safety responsibilities of the guards is only around £5-6k per year after five years. That is precious little in order to sell out a whole grade of workers and assume their responsibilities, especially in a recent climate where traincrew are relatively frequently being dragged into court and blamed for accidents that occur during train dispatch.

The two worst things about the deal are firstly that it accepts the idea of “exceptional circumstances” where a train that is scheduled to carry an On Board Supervisor can run without one. This was a feature of the two previous proposed settlements, both of which were rejected by Aslef members when put to a vote. Secondly, the responsibility for policing the application of these exceptional circumstances will fall on individual drivers.

This effectively places RMT members’ industrial strength (their ability to stop the running of trains by withdrawing their labour) at the mercy of another grade of workers, most of whom belong to a separate union. That this deal should have been put to the vote at all might seem surprising. After all, a previous attempt by GTR Southern to resolve the DOO dispute by attaching the capitulation to a tempting pay increase resulted in a new dispute and new industrial action ballot over pay running alongside the DOO issue.

There was much public outrage from the union’s leaders that the company had attempted to link the settlements of these separate disputes as a way of bribing drivers to settle for DOO, so it could seem strange that they have u-turned on this now. But it is something of an open secret that Aslef had been desperate to settle.

Southern had offered to write off around half a million pounds in legal costs owed to them by the union and withdraw the threat of further action in the Supreme Court, where there would be no ceiling on costs that could be awarded against Aslef if they were to lose. Aslef has only 20,000 members, and those costs could have crippled it financially or even bankrupted it.

The Aslef leadership will attempt to justify this sellout by pointing to this existential threat and saying that this settlement was necessary to save the union. However, this does not stand up for two reasons.

First that there has been no attempt to turn outwards to the rest of the labour movement and appeal for help in the face of an attempt by a Tory government, through its proxy Southern, to financially destroy a trade union.

Second, a union exists to defend and advance the pay and conditions of its members. When the only options available are to fight or to fail those members (and members of other trade unions) so spectacularly, the only honourable choice is to fight, despite the grave risk. The Aslef leaders spent most of their time during this dispute shut away in secret negotiations with the company, not heeding repeated calls for further action from their own members or changing course when those members twice rejected their proposed settlements.

This turn of events is demoralising, if not entirely surprising. RMT remains in dispute over DOO at Southern as well as on South West Railway, Greater Anglia, Northern and Merseyrail. It is now vital that a support movement grows up around these disputes, to sustain RMT and to draw Aslef into action.

TfL plans job cuts

Transport for London has announced a plan to cut 1,400 jobs as part of its “transformation” programme, a bid to save up to £5 billion as the Tories slash TfL’s central government subsidy. These jobs will come from engineering, admin, managerial, and other departments. Unions must resist this cuts onslaught.

Any job lost will be a setback, as it accepts the principle that cutting staff — whatever their grade or department — is the first option for making “savings” rather than, for example, trimming senior management pay, or actually fighting the government on the question of the subsidy.

A genuinely radical Labour administration in City Hall would not be taking the cuts lying down. It would be telling the Tories that it does not accept the reduction in the subsidy, and publicly declaring that it will support any and all union action against the cuts. In the past, radical Labour councils such as Poplar in the 1920s and Clay Cross in the 1970s have taken on Tory governments by refusing to pass on central government cuts to local people by cutting services or increasing council rents.

Our unions should be demanding a similar stance from Sadiq Khan and the GLA. In the meantime, we need to get organised across the job, particularly in immediately affected areas, to build for industrial action to resist the cuts.

PCS: time to ballot!

The 49% turnout in PCS’s consultative pay ballot is an enormous tribute to the hard work of activists and many officers. It shows what can be done. That said, whilst in principle the result is a mandate for action, we must not forget that PCS achieved less than the 50% turnout that it would need to secure a lawful ballot result (as defined by the Tories regressive anti-union legislation). This despite the fact that easier methods of voting (including electronic voting) were used that would not be permissible under current legislation in an industrial action ballot.

From what we understand, electronic voting was crucial to the turn out figure. We believe that the PCS leadership needs to learn from the CWU ballot and from their own many past failures to build sufficient membership support. It has plentiful data from the consultative ballot to determine which areas delivered the vote and which did not. Therefore it should know where we are weak.

To put the union on a war footing and so to win the legal ballot, we urge the leadership to prepare the ballot carefully and not lose momentum over the Christmas period.

• For full article and recommendations for next steps, see PCS Independent Left

Uber loses tribunal appeal

On Friday 10 November, Uber lost it’s appeal against an employment tribunal ruling that its drivers should be classed as workers, with all the associated rights of workers including that of the minimum wage.

Uber claims its drivers are self-employed, and says it will appeal again, meaning the case may end up in the Supreme Court. However as Jason Moyer-Lee of the IWGB (one of the unions involved in the case) explained in the Guardian: “the employment tribunal challenges have not been about whether or not the workers in question were self-employed. For as the supreme court has made clear, and as has been repeated ad nauseam by lower courts and tribunals, the law recognises two types of self-employed people. The first type are micro-entrepreneurs or professionals contracting with clients or customers. The second type — known as Limb (b) workers — carry out their work as part of someone else’s business rather than their own, and as such are entitled to a number of employment rights such as holidays, minimum wage and pensions contributions.”

A win over Uber may be close, but is still quite far off for workers in a variety of other courier and private hire companies.

Bring UoL workers in-house!
Outsourced workers at the University of London will strike on Tuesday 21 November in their campaign to be brought back in-house and get in-house terms and conditions.

The workers, who are cleaners, security officers, receptionists porters and post room workers, are organised by the IWGB union. The union is campaigning for all workers to be taken back in-house, for all zero-hour contract workers to be given permanent contracts, and for a promised pay rise for security officers, receptionists porters and post room workers.

Workers will strike from 2pm on Tuesday 21 November, and hold a demo at University of London Senate House at 6pm. •

Follow the campaign here

Arriva bus strike continues

Drivers and engineers on buses operated by Arriva North West will strike again for nine days.

The workers, members of Unite, work on buses in the Liverpool, Merseyside, Manchester, Lancashire or Cheshire. They are fighting for a pay rise and for differentials in pay between garages to be addressed by levelling up pay.

Workers will strike on 20 and 27 November, and 4, 7, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22 and 23 December.

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