Wot No Funding? Wot No Fightback?

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

Attacks on our jobs and conditions are coming thick and fast. Cleaners still working for appalling pay, a cull of admin staff, stations struggling with skeleton staffing levels, unfair sackings, anti-social hours ... and you can be sure that whatever pay rise our employers are planning, it will not be generous. The big impetus behind this is the Tory government's policy of cutting TfL's funding until London Underground runs without any operating subsidy at all.

Management and the Mayor would evidently rather implement these cuts than resist them. Why, they ask themselves, punch upwards at your political masters rather than punch downwards at the workers and passengers? As ever, it is down to us to fight in our own interests.

But while the unions are fighting important battles on particular issues, they seem rather quieter on the big picture. This amounts to treating the symptoms of an illness rather than the illness itself - it's better than doing nothing, but not as effective as going to the source. We have strikes by workers in various depots over local issues, but where is the build-up to an industrial and political fight to reverse the funding cut? Even a decision by RMT's regional council last year to call a rank-and-file conference to plan such a campaign seems to have come to nothing so far.

So come on, comrades - let's step up this battle!

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