RMT: We need rank-and-file organisation

Posted in Off The Rails's blog on ,
The Rank and File
Author

Workers' Liberty supporters active in RMT

With the election of Alex Gordon, a member of the Communist Party of Britain's Executive Committee, as National President, the Broad Left faction – an alliance between supporters of the Communist Party/Morning Star and other Stalinists, and a traditional 'Old Labour' element – has further consolidated its power within RMT’s structures.

Its favoured candidate, Mick Lynch, won the General Secretary election, and its candidate Eddie Dempsey was recently elected Assistant General Secretary. Broad Left supporters and fellow-travellers hold numerous full-time officer and staff positions in the union, and several seats on the union's rank-and-file National Executive Committee. Its existing base within the union bureaucracy gave the Broad Left a significant platform, but it is not just a bureaucratic shell. BL has succeeded because it has organised consistently over several years.

There are many RMT activists, ourselves included, who hold an opposing perspective to the Broad Left’s. We want genuinely militant industrial struggle, more power for the union’s rank-and-file and less for its officialdom, and international links based on solidarity with workers not with authoritarian regimes. However, this group of activists has failed to organise, and has often actively opposed the idea of organisation.

This article explores some of the issues, and appeals to those activists to get serious about organisation within the union.

Organising in the union to improve organisation in the workplace

Our enemy is the boss class – not other members of the RMT, or its officials or staff, who have different views on union organisation and policies. Nevertheless, trade unions are, by their nature, sites of internal contestation. Union members and activists debate everything – how the union organises, its demands, policies and structures. If we ignore those arguments, or pursue them inconsistently, we abandon the terrain to those already best entrenched within the union's bureaucracy.

We do not advocate that union activists continually focus on internal debates. On the contrary, our primary focus is on organising in the workplace. But those internal debates impact on workplace organising. If we want an effective union, we have to engage in debate within it in a consistent, organised way. This is even more true if we see trade unionism as part of a wider class-struggle politics aimed at replacing capitalism with socialism.

There has always been tension between the union’s bureaucracy and its rank and file. For some time, many RMT activists acted as though this tension had been resolved – that RMT, with its charismatic, militant General Secretary Bob Crow, was a "fighting union", and that activists only needed to preserve a leadership upholding that fighting spirit. There was a relatively militant culture under Crow, but the tensions were suppressed not resolved. Since his untimely death, they have resurfaced.

Many who oppose the Broad Left’s perspectives have recoiled from its "factionalism", seeing the problem as the fact that it is organised, rather than the ideas that it organises for. Some even see basic forms of organisation, such as producing bulletins, as unacceptable.

To change our union, we must abandon this approach. This year's AGM, at which the Broad Left lost on almost all the controversial issues of organisation and policy, shows that there is an activist base for an alternative to its ideas. But that must be built actively: without this, future AGMs could have very different outcomes.

The issues at stake

The Broad Left has, at least, a selective approach to trade union militancy. It claimed the outcome of the Southwestern Railway dispute was an inadmissible sell out, while supporting a near-identical settlement (before any strike action) on Transport for Wales. The difference? The first dispute was led by people it does not like, the second by those it does.

At the 2021 AGM, the Broad Left advocated creating reserved seats for women, and for black and ethnic minority members, on the union's NEC, but without asking the opinions of those groups’ representative bodies first. BL supporters have consistently opposed attempts to give the union's self-organised equalities committees greater power. And some prominent Broad Left supporters have at best a questionable record on trans rights, and equality issues more widely.

The Broad Left’s international politics are highly problematic. The union's new AGS visited Ukraine to associate with a misogynistic nationalist warlord, for whom he later wrote a glowing eulogy. The AGS, along with the new President, provided security for a public meeting addressed by the journalist Vanessa Beeley, who has promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories and supports the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The Stalinist position on China was defeated at the recent AGM; that debate will undoubtedly continue.

Every RMT member has the right to organise politically beyond the union, and to promote their views within the union. As those debates sharpen within RMT, activists who do not wish to see their union adopt Stalinist positions need to organise to prevent it.

The central question now animating debate within RMT is: who runs the union? Is it the rank-and-file membership, via branches, a lay National Executive Committee, and a sovereign AGM, or is it officers and staff?

Contestation over this question precipitated the resignation of former General Secretary Mick Cash and, most recently, a strike by head office staff which shut the union's AGM, in response to the passing of an appeal which some staff interpreted as an attack on them. Some staff also submitted a complaint against Finsbury Park RMT branch for passing a motion suggesting improvements to the union's social media and press strategy, which they interpreted as an attack on union staff.

Many on the RMT left counterpose this with the assertion that they are "for the members". But few in any trade union would say they are not "for the members". We need more specifics: What structures, what forms of organisation, what policies, what demands do we propose to ensure that members are empowered?

The bureaucratic, officer-led approach makes the union appear to members as a service provider, an external body to which they pay a monthly fee in exchange for "protection at work" and individual representation. Following a generation of defeats for workers, that model has come to dominate trade unionism. Without rank-and-file organisation, it risks becoming entrenched in RMT.

We need independent rank-and-file organisation

The non-Stalinist left in RMT has lurched from election to election, without building any permanent organisation in between, and has lost every national contest since the 2018 Presidential election to a candidate backed by the Broad Left.

It should not take another defeat to wake us up. We need not just more effective organisation in national elections, but an organised network based on rank-and-file reps and activists who share a vision for the union we want to see.

What would such a rank-and-file network do?

• advocate militant industrial strategies for fighting and winning disputes - unconditionally resisting any and all cuts and empowering members in affected companies to take effective action to resist;

• fight for genuine industrial unionism, coordinating action across grades and between directly-employed and outsourced workers;

• develop resources, including propaganda and training materials, to help newer activists get involved in the union and build struggles;

• consider standing in elections for NEC, officer or other positions within the union, on a platform and with a candidate discussed and decided by the network;

• fight for a more democratic and accountable union, deepening and extending union democracy by fighting for things like: elected strike committees to discuss and plan disputes; more power for the union's equalities committees; limits on senior officer salaries, to ensure our leaders don't become materially privileged over the majority of the people they represent;

• organise for these principles at local as well as national level, supporting members in making branches more democratic, inclusive and effective;

• discuss wider political perspectives, and adopt political principles. Workers' Liberty members would want any rank-and-file network to adopt a socialist political perspective, with socialism understood as democratic working-class rule, based on common ownership, underpinned by working-class internationalism that rejects support for authoritarian states or movements. But a rank-and-file network wouldn't need to take detailed policy positions on every political issue, and could encompass a diversity of socialist viewpoints and groups.

• be open to any RMT member who agreed with its aims and its vision for a more effective, democratic union; and might discuss an affiliation structure allowing RMT branches to support it.

Learning from our history

In 1991, the first iteration of a grouping called the "Campaign for a Fighting, Democratic Union" (CFDU) was founded. It developed into a significant organisation, coordinating large numbers of militant activists, and winning affiliations from branches and Regional Councils. But when, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, prominent CFDU supporters, including Bob Crow, were elected to senior officer positions, the organisation was closed down, on the basis that the newly-formed Socialist Labour Party could deal with the politics and that now better people were in charge of the union, everything would be alright! An attempted rebrand of the CFDU as the "Campaign for Public Ownership of Public Transport" in the early 2000s quickly fizzled out.

In 2007, RMT’s London Underground Engineering branch, along with some individual activists, attempted to relaunch the CFDU, around issues such as defying anti-union legislation, but the attempt petered out soon after. (See for some interviews with activists involved.)

Most recently, in 2018, tentative steps towards another "relaunched" CFDU were made, but activists’ energies were rapidly diverted into two national elections, for President in 2018, and General Secretary in 2019. In the former, Michelle Rodgers, the CFDU-backed candidate, won convincingly. In the latter, the CFDU supported Sean Hoyle, who lost to incumbent Mick Cash. The new CFDU never consolidated into a formally-declared network, and apart from some bulletins for delegates to the 2019 AGM, didn't undertake any outward-facing activity.

There are some lessons from all this. An over-focus on union elections, to the exclusion of other activity, will derail attempts to set up a functioning rank-and-file network. Any network needs to have a clearly-declared platform and vision for transforming the union, which it pursues consistently, not just until it gets the "right people" elected.

Wherever these discussions go, Workers' Liberty members will use Off the Rails, and the Tubeworker bulletin we publish on London Underground, as a platform to promote these ideas of rank-and-file organisation and power. We invite any RMT member who shares this general perspective and approach to use this platform too.


Some elements of this article are adapted from "How can we improve our union?", July 2020.

Off The Rails topics

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.