Off The Rails Summer 2009

The recession is seeing railway employers wage full-scale attacks on workers, and a patchy resistance to these attacks. Our first report shows London Overground workers fighting and winning. There are other examples too, though none on quite such an impressive scale! But elsewhere, cuts have gone through, with the unions able only to minimise the pain rather than defeat the attack. Sometimes, workers have even declined the union’s invitation to strike in defence of their jobs. Why? There are several factors. Those balloted may be working for small employers or in small units, with a high...

Earlier this year, staff on London Overground won an impressive victory, and beat the lie that you can not fight and win during a recession. 300 station staff, conductors and booking clerks had been angry for years, feeling that their work conditions were appalling. Staff accommodation was inadequate. Pay was low: as little as £14,000 a year plus benefits. Industrial relations had completely broken down. Private company Silverlink held the contract for years and did nothing for staff. In late 2007, ‘London Overground’ took over the contract and came under the Transport for London umbrella...

Pre-emptive scabbing by some guards at Lincoln and a capitulatory text from the Norwich guards rep on the company mobile effectively sabotaged the strike action called by RMT for May 1st against East Midlands Trains’ threat of compulsory redundancies. The strike ballot result was not the best: a low turnout and short of a 2-to-1 majority. RMT held off announcing strike dates until TSSA’s strike ballot result, but that was a ‘no’ vote. RMT members had felt that after years striking for better pay and conditions while TSSA did nothing, at least this time when lots of TSSA members faced voluntary...

Eurostar cleaners at St Pancras International have been boycotting fingerprint booking-on machines since 6 May. RMT balloted them for ‘action short of strikes’ in protest at Carlisle Cleaning Services bringing in the devices to replace clocking on/off machines. Cleaners voted 30:1 for the boycott. Employers like Carlisle seem to think that they can impose whatever indignity they choose. The cleaners’ resistance shows that they can not get away with it. This fight should give new momentum to efforts to unionise cleaners and win better pay and conditions for some of the worst-treated workers in...

Off the Rails favours unions backing independent working-class challenges in elections - but No2EU was not such an initiative. It did not speak up for our class, and its main union backer was the RMT executive which did not consult the membership before making its decision. Our Executive supported the campaign in response to a letter from Trade Unionists Against The European Union Constitution (TUAEUC). Having done nothing for several years the circular letter announced a very ambitious plan to stand candidates in the European Union elections. Called ‘No2EU – Yes to Democracy’, its ten-point...

London Midland conductors based at Bletchley, Northampton and Watford took eight days of strike action to demand the right to opt out of Sunday working, but while they forced the company to back off, the issue may not yet be over. The 120 conductors came from Central Trains or Silverlink - where Sunday working was voluntary - or were new starters, issued with a London Midland contract which did not include the right to opt out of Sundays. With harmonisation talks far from over, LM jumped the gun and tried to impose rostered Sunday working. Whoever they worked for previously, the conductors...

London Underground and Transport for London workers struck for 48 hours from 9-11 June over pay, jobs and bullying. 1,000 LU jobs and up to 3,000 in TfL are to go. LUL will not rule out compulsory redundancies, despite a 2001 agreement. LU had tabled a 5-year pay offer amounting to a pay cut; TfL made no offer. Managers have been mistreating staff, sometimes breaching procedures. A 5:1 strike vote was abandoned as LUL threatened legal action over technicalities in the ballot notification. RMT’s reballot saw a bigger, 6:1, majority, albeit a lower turnout. As the strike was about to start, RMT...

This article looks beyond the rail industry and surveys the unions’ response to the crisis. ===== There have been a few significant and inspiring battles against job losses in recent months, notably the engineering construction industry strikes and the Visteon and Waterford Crystals occupations, but the overall picture is a trade union movement in retreat and with no coherent strategy to defend jobs. The most common response to the threat of job losses in manufacturing has been ‘concessions bargaining’, in which the trade unions respond to the intensification of the ‘global race to the bottom’...

TOCs are hitting out at catering, with the loss of buffets, services and jobs. East Coast has restructured catering, and few restaurant cars now remain. On National Express East Anglia, all restaurants have gone, part of a package of 300 job cuts, most of them lost from the Norwich call centre. On Virgin Cross Country, all shops have gone and it is now trolleys only, with nothing north of Edinburgh or west of Plymouth. Even First Great Western catering staff, who successfully defended themselves through a strike ballot last year, now face management trying to undo what they won. Catering staff...

The roots of the current economic crisis lie in the capitalist system itself. Capital does not sit still. If you get a twenty quid shopping voucher for your birthday, it might sit in your wallet for a couple of months before you get round to spending it. But capital? No. A capitalist who gets twenty quid - or twenty thousand - will immediately find a way of selling it on for twenty-five. Then investing that twenty-five to turn it into thirty-five. Then placing a bet and making it fifty. The daily business of banks is to take your money and try to turn it into more money (giving only a small...