Defend Every Job!

Posted in Tubeworker's blog on ,

An army wouldn’t go into a war having already accepted defeat, and we shouldn’t go into our battle to defend jobs accepting that some job cuts are inevitable. We’d be doomed to defeat.

Our trade unions must take a stance of ‘no job cuts’ and defend every job. If we accept any job cuts, we simply invite management to come for more.

It is not the role of our unions to help management cut jobs, or to limit themselves to fighting for ‘less painful’ job cuts. Drawing the line at ‘no compulsory redundancies’ rather than ‘no job cuts’ would be particularly weak in a company where the unions won a ‘no compulsory redundancies’ agreement over a decade ago.

There are probably three reasons that people give for the ‘inevitability’ of some job cuts:

1. New technology means we need fewer workers. But we still need staff alongside the technology, to make sure it keeps working and to pick up the reins when it doesn’t. If new kit makes a job less labour-intensive, that’s good. It doesn’t have to mean job cuts – it should instead mean shorter working hours, more spare turns, more staff on standby. And if some new gear really does away with a job, there is always another one needing to be created elsewhere.

2. There’s a recession and the company has to save money. TfL and London Underground should get more government money to maintain and improve services. This has happened during recessions in the past. In Paris, employers pay a ‘payroll tax’ to help fund the Metro: TfL should fight for a similar funding boost here. And if they must make savings, our bosses should look first to their own well-stuffed pockets. (Indeed, we’d be prepared to waive our ‘no job cuts’ policy in the case of senior managers.)

3. The unions have proved themselves incapable of preventing job cuts so the best we can hope for is a decent voluntary redundancy deal. Yes, we have had defeats – and avoidable ones, as mistakes were made. But job cuts would have been much worse if the unions hadn’t put up some sort of fight, and there have been successes as well as stumbles. Voluntary redundancy means selling jobs and closing them to future workers.

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