Strategy needed to defend our jobs

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

Every Tube worker knows that we have the fight of our lives coming up. The Olympics have provided a brief respite from job cuts, but once they are over, the onslaught will begin.

There is no use waiting for management to announce the job cuts, then throwing our hands up in horror and scrambling out of the blocks for a fightback which some will declare lost before it has even started. The bosses are cranking up their preparations; we have to crank up our battle to defend ourselves. We have a lot of experiences to learn from. Looking back over past disputes – some wins, more defeats, some somewhere in between – we can identify key planks of an effective strategy.

One recent win was in service control, where an RMT campaign and planned strike won, among other things, lifetime protection of earnings for anyone displaced in a reorganisation. The were three important aspects of that fight. Firstly, it was driven by workplace reps, who raised the issues, organised a rank-and-file grades committee, and got information and campaigning up and running. Secondly, rather than put on a token one-day strike or the gimmick of a strike on a ‘special event’ day, the union put on a three-day strike, the fear of which forced management to back down. And thirdly, the issues arise from LU’s plan to open a new super-control-centre at Hammersmith in 2015, but we didn’t wait until 2015 to fight to protect the interests of workers.

LUL will use new technology as an excuse to cut jobs. We can’t – and shouldn’t – oppose new technology per se, but neither should we shrug our shoulders and say that there is nothing we can do to stop it culling jobs. We can – and must – insist that it is used to help staff do our job, not to replace us.

Management are putting policies into place NOW that will lead to job cuts in the near future. In order to manage with fewer of us, they will need to spread us more thinly, so they want to weaken the agreements that currently stop them deploying us any time any place any where. With the exception of ASLEF’s shabby deal, we largely stopped the company using the pretext of the Olympics to weaken agreements. But they will be at it again.

ICSAs may be the issue in our face right now, but cuts in training, more stored-value ticketing, trains without proper cabs, new kit that claims not to need the human attention that the old kits needs, ‘reorganisation’, ... all this and more is on the agenda, and we need to fight to defend each and every job and condition. Management try out these policies, and run them by union reps in various areas. As well as doing their usual job of talking to management about this, the reps need to pool the information so the unions can put together the pieces that make up management’s job-cutting jigsaw. And the unions need to fight on these issues – now.

We need a kind of ‘charter’ of demands, which must include a clear guarantee of no job cuts, a supervisor on every station 24/7, a driver (not an ‘attendant’) on every train, and frequent maintenance inspections, and a demand that LUL and TfL open the books – they should reveal their behind-closed-doors discussions, and let the unions go through their finances. This set of demands can be the basis for effective industrial action. ‘Effective’ will mean strikes that are sustained, supported by other action that is imaginative, all of it democratically planned by rank-an-file activists genuinely representative of their workmates. We need a ‘fighting fund’ for that action – because everyone knows that we won’t win with short, token strikes, and many people will need help coping with the demand that places on them. But the price you’ll pay for not fighting will be much higher.

Our opponents in the corridors of power often paint us as dinosaurs who won’t accept new technology and change, and only know how to say No. So let’s offer a positive vision of our London Transport: bring all the privatised sections eg. cleaning, catering, engineering contractors, back inhouse; a fully-staffed, properly-maintained system providing cheap and accessible travel; with new lines, extensions and increased capacity to improve the system, clean up London’s environment and create jobs – including apprenticeships – at a time when they are very much needed. An outgoing campaign for demands like this could win us much-needed support. And with London’s transport now fragmented into different companies, it also gives us a framework to bring our battles on Tube Lines, TfL, contractors, DLR etc, into a co-ordinated fight.

But where our unions have often fallen down in the past is by a lack of consistent presence in every workplace. The best strategy in the world will have no chance of winning if it is confined to branch meeting rooms and is not grounded in what people and thinking, talking about and willing to do at work. To defend ourselves against those who are attacking us, we need to make sure that we are stronger than them

We all know that the company has unpleasant plans up its sleeve – as well as the unpleasant plans it is already putting into action. Our unions need to convince us that they are up to fighting these attacks. That means that they have to tell us what’s going on, and engage us in discussions and decisions about how we can fight back. We want to see our reps and full-timers in our workplaces, and we want support in resisting management’s attacks where they are actually taking place ie. at work. As this won’t happen just by us wishing for it, we need thorough discussions at every level of the unions, from branch meetings to mass meetings, from training for reps to recruitment drives to win new members. And we need all sections of the workforce to feel welcome and involved in union action: all grades, men and women, without discrimination.

Our unions should be working together – little strengthens the employer more than seeing one union let down the others, or the unions expending energy on bickering which they could be spending on fighting the bosses’ attacks. And they should build unity beyond the Tube too – linking up with the workers’ movement and the travelling public.

These attacks are happening because the government and the employers never miss an opportunity to make workers (and working-class service users) pay for economic crisis and private profiteering. So there is a political campaign to be run too; we need to confidently argue back against the privatisers and profiteers, and we need to mobilise for protest actions and political lobbying.

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