The LU Olympics Opening cleaners’ strike was a success. Cleaners hit Initial with pickets and solid action at places such as Ruislip and Hainault depots. At Hammersmith depot, it took four hours to bus enough agency staff past the picket to cover the work. At London Bridge Station, pickets turned agency staff away.
The strike showed the power of a low-paid and marginalised group of workers against multinational corporations. We stopped their work and cost them money.
ISS senior management watched the protest at Stratford, clearly rattled as we publicly shamed them.
We’ve given them a taste of what we can do. With the strikes this Thursday and Friday, we can build on it, improve our organisation and fight until we secure victory.
To improve our organisation, we need to:
Tackle the issue of agency workers. Some agency workers were there because cleaning companies are providing extra Olympic cleaners, but others were bussed in to break the strikes, which is illegal.
Longstanding agency RMT members were warned, ‘if you strike, you may consider yourself sacked…… ‘
The RMT needs to use opportunities for organising agency workers, opened up by the agency workers’ regulations. The regulations, in effect since October 2011, say agency staff employed for over three months should receive equal pay and conditions to permanent workers. The RMT could recruit agency cleaners, gather information, expose agencies’ corrupt practices, force them to follow the law, improve agency members’ conditions, making agencies less of a cheap option, which will help effective strike action in future.
Turn RMT’s slogan, ‘an all grades union’, into a reality. On paper, cleaners, drivers and station staff, etc. are all part of the same union. But, as one cleaner simply put it, ‘we are divided’. We need to fight the idea that RMT has a ‘core membership’ (drivers, signallers, etc.), whose concerns are more important than cleaners’ or workers with less history of union organisation. Organising contracted-out, super-exploited workers is greedy on resources. It needs face-to-face, grass-roots campaigning; there is relatively high staff turnover. If the RMT is serious about organising cleaners, the money must be available. Tubeworker hopes RMT’s move to put cleaners into local branches with engineers and station colleagues will help knit us together.
Challenge bureaucracy by building up rank and file organisation. Bureaucratic slow-moving has frustrated this strike. Cleaners waited weeks for ballot papers after the RMT had decided to ballot for strike. With the Olympics approaching, the ballot period was shortened; the campaign struggled to re-launch in time for the strike. The best way to pull power back from the union machine into the hands of workers is to build up strong organisation of the workers in dispute. We need to support cleaners to organise themselves and direct this dispute.
With the organisation in place, cleaners will be in a position determination their direction and, if they choose, to fight until they win their claims.
