Article for Labour Briefing on London Transport workers' struggles

I have written this short article for Labour Briefing:

On 6 February, despite strong opposition from trade unions and passengers, London Underground completed its cut of 800 jobs from its stations. It slashed ticket office opening hours and removed staff from around the stations, leaving safety and security compromised and passengers without the help they need. Private-sector-run upgrades are seeing repeated failures, and maintenance regimes are being slashed.

RMT and TSSA fought the job cuts, taking four separate days’ strike action between September and November. The two unions are now engaged in a review of the job cuts with LU management which may yet restore some of the cut jobs.

During the dispute, LU took hostages, sacking three RMT representatives in an attempt to weaken the union. LU has since reinstated stations rep Peter Hartshorn on appeal, as his Piccadilly line workmates prepared for strike action. But train driver RMT reps Eamonn Lynch and Arwyn Thomas remain sacked. Both have won ’interim relief’, as Employment Tribunal judges ruled that LU had sacked them unfairly due to their trade union activities. It is very rare for sacked union reps to win interim relief; the fact that Eamonn and Arwyn did so shows beyond doubt that their sackings were an anti-union act.

Eamonn’s and Arwyn’s workmates on the Bakerloo and Northern lines have taken two days’ strike action to demand their reinstatement. RMT is now preparing to escalate the dispute by balloting all our driver members for strikes. Rank-and-file reps and members understand that the sackings are not merely injustices against two members, but an attack on the union and on trade unionism in general.

Workers on the Docklands Light Railway voted in January by a big majority for strike action over several issues, including cuts in pension rights, imposed restructuring, and the sacking of two workmates. But the employer, Serco Docklands, ran to the High Court, which duly obliged them with an injunction against the strike. RMT had not broken any existing anti-union law, so the judge invented a new one and declared the union to have broken that!

The injunction extends Britain’s already highly-repressive anti-union legislation, by declaring that a union must give a far more detailed explanation of how it compiled the information it has to provide to the employer in its notices of ballots and industrial action. So RMT has appealed against the injunction; as I write, the appeal has been heard, but judgment may not be given until March.

Once again, democratic, effective trade union action has been thwarted by anti-democratic laws and judges, bent on serving the employers. It is telling indeed that when a court rules a strike unlawful on a flimsy pretext, the union has to obey and call off the strike; but when a court rules a sacking unlawful on good grounds, the employer does not have to obey and reinstate the sacked worker! David Cameron claims that Britain’s employment law is weighed too heavily in favour of the employer, but these latest cases prove the opposite.

It is easy enough to denounce anti-union laws and judges; it is now high time for a renewed campaign to defeat them. Our unions must mobilise members to fight for trade union rights, and those who claim to represent the labour movement in politics must make a stand against the anti-union laws, rather than staying away when they have a chance to do so, as when John McDonnell’s Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill was debated in Parliament.

Follow RMT in the London Transport region:
Website: www.rmtlondoncalling.org.uk
Twitter: @RMTLondon

By Janine Booth, London Transport region representative, RMT Council of Executives

CBI: One Rule for the Bosses, Another for Workers

The CBI is proposing measures to make it even harder to strike.

In particular, the bosses' club wants "rules on strike action to be changed to ensure that industrial action has the support of 40% of the balloted workforce, in addition to a majority of votes cast."

The CBI is asking the Tory-led government to legislate for this, conveniently ignoring the fact that if such a rule applied in General Elections, they would not even be the government. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no government would ever have become the goverment under such rules.

But we wouldn't expect bosses to be champions of democracy, given that they didn't get their own jobs and don't pursue their own policies, through a democratic process. How about we introduce a new rule that companies can not cut jobs without balloting the workforce first, and achieving both a majority of votes cast and 40% of the total balloted workforce. Fair's fair, huh?

The CBI also wants the consultation period on redundancies cut from 90 to 30 days. So workers would get one month, rather than three, to argue for alternatives to redundancy - and to look for an alternative job. This move would self-evidently increase unemployment, and therefore the demands on state spending, just at the time when everyone says that they want to cut these things.

This isn't about democracy at all. It is about tying up trade unions in even tighter chains than those that tie them already. It's high time for those union to go beyond sad speeches about how terrible the anti-union laws and start some sustained and effective action to get them repealed.

A New Chance to Tackle Anti-Union Laws

This is really good news. It is important that we do not just let John get on with proposing his Bill to a hostile Parliament, but mobilise in support of it.

Press release from John McDonnell MP ...

As one door closes another one open: John McDonnell tops the poll in the Private Members' Bill Ballot.

John McDonnell MP has been drawn first in the Private Members' Bill Ballot today and has opted for a Bill to tackle abuse of trade union ballots by employers.

John McDonnell said:

"It's a funny old world, as one door closes another one opens. Coming top in this poll will enable me to tackle an abuse of the current employment laws by employers that I have tried to reform for the last 4 years."

"As we have seen in the current BA Cabin Crew dispute and many other recent disputes, employers have been able to exploit a loophole in the existing law by using minor technical errors in a trade union ballot for industrial action to frustrate the democratic decisions of trade unionists who wish to take action. This resort to the courts by some ruthless employers is bringing current employment law into disrepute and undermining industrial relations in this country. The courts are being dragged into disputes and used as weapons in the hands of bullying employers. Even where there have been overwhelming majorities in ballots in favour of strike action, minor technicalities which would have no material effect on the outcome of the ballot, are being exploited to negate the democratic decision of the trade unionists involved. This cannot be right and in the interests of good industrial relations needs to be addressed."

Note-to Editors-

Over the past four years John has made several attempts to tackle this issue by introducing amendments to the then Government's employment legislation and promoting in Parliament the TUC backed Trade Union Freedom Bill.

Court Bans RMT Strike - It's Nothing To Do With Justice

The court ruling injuncting RMT's strike of Network Rail signallers lays bare Britain's trade union legislation for what it is: a set of laws designed not to ensure justice but to stop workers fighting back against the employers' offensive.

Network Rail plans to slash 1,500 maintenance workers' jobs. Despite the fact that this will endanger rail travellers, chuck people on the dole and screw up the working lives of those who remain, there is no law that stops Network Rail doing this. It didn't have to ballot anyone, let alone provide its opponents with incredibly detailed information of exactly whom it balloted.

It is also attacking the working conditions of signallers, imposing anti-social rosters, increasing their safety responsibilities by stopping the use of track detonators, and taking away their rights to transfer and promotion. Again, no law to stop them; no need to ballot.

Network Rail's employees want to object to this. They have no say in how the company is run, their lobbying of politicians has fallen on deaf ears, and although they have leafleted the public and gained a lot of public support, the employer and the government ignores that too. There is only one effective weapon in their arsenal - their right to withdraw their labour.

Techncially, they have the legal right to strike. But in practice, this seems to be a bit like me having the 'right' to do an Army obstacle course - there are so many walls to climb over, nets to crawl under and bogs to wade through that with the best will in the world, I probably wouldn't manage it.

Trade union legislation requires unions to give employers advance notice of both its ballot and of the industrial action it plans to take, so that the employer can do as much as possible to minimise the effect of the action. That is quite bad enough. It is like Accrington Stanley playing Manchester United in the FA Cup and having to send ManU their team sheet and tactics a week in advance so that their top-flight opponents can have a massive advantage and a clear headstart towards winning.

But worse still, the union's notification of the ballot has to be so detailed that it is near-impossible for a union to meet, particularly if it organises workers in a variety of grades and work locations with a high turnover. It has to send a list - or matrix - stating the exact number of workers in every grade and every location involved in the industrial action ballot. On London Underground, for example, we have hundreds of work locations (nearly 300 stations, plus all the depots, admin buildings, etc), and dozens of grades, with people changing grade and/or location all the time.

And worse still, the employer does not even have to give the union the information it has that would help the union to compile that information! So Network Rail does not have to tell RMT that one of its signal boxes has burned down, and can then get a judge to declare a strike ballot illegal because RMT included that box in its ballot notification.

There are strong echoes of another judge banning Unite BA cabin crew for striking at Christmas because it had balloted staff who had expressed an interest in voluntary severance, even though the employer had not told the union that they had expressed an intersted in volunary severance!

The fact that these laws and rulings are nothing to do with fairness is frequently underlined by those who celebrate them. Read and listen to comments welcoming the court's ban on the RMT strike. Very few vox pops say "I wouldn;t have a problem with this strike if they had only got the postcode of that signal box correct". No, they say "I'm glad the strike's been banned, because now we can impose our job cuts / I'll be able to get my train on time / I hate bolshy workers and militant trade unions anyway."

RMT will almost certainly reballot and continue its fight against these catastrophic job cuts. But the question remains: WIll the TUC call a massive mobilisation in defence of a fundamental right that has been stripped away by successive Labour and Tory governments - the right to strike?!

Workers Standing Up For Themselves? There Must Be A Law Against It!

British Airways have gone crawling to the unelected octogenarian wig-wearing brigade in an attempt to get cabin crew strike action declared illegal.

The company claims inaccuracies in the union's ballot, in that people who no longer worked for BA were sent ballot papers. I would be interested to know whether BA notifies Unite when employees leave, because it seems to me that if an employer refuses to assist a union in maintaining 100% accurate membership information, then it has no right to complain if there is a slight flaw.

Moreover, the very idea that a handful of inaccuracies would have altered the outcome of a ballot in which over 80% voted and over 90% of them voted Yes is, of course, completely absurd.

And therein lies the crux of this particular anti-union law. It is not designed to ensure ballots are spotlessly accurate - if it were, it would require employers to co-operate with the union in maintaining records. Rather, it is designed to give courts a pretext to ban strikes at the behest of any employer who can find the tiniest imperfection in the ballot.

The bigger the workforce, the higher the number of workplaces and grades, the faster the staff turnover, the nearer impossible it is for unions to keep up-to-the-minute information for balloting. When RMT on London Underground fell foul of the law on balloting information in 2001, there were 150 staff movements per week on the Tube!

Meanwhile, Unite General Secretary Tony Woodley has just been on the telly. He told us that his members (not himself, presumably) were prepared to take a permanent 2.5% pay cut as an alternative to BA's proposals, and that they would call off the strike if the company paused - explicitly, did not need to indefinitely postpone - its imposition of attacks on pay and conditions. If this was an attempt to appear 'reasonable', it appeared to fail spectacularly, as text messages condemning the union continued to wing their way to the BBC. A bit more assertiveness and a bit less grovelling would go a long way.

Friday Fuckwit: A Spokesman With No Name

Again, the 'Friday Fuckwit' award comes a day late.

This week, it goes to the unnamed spokesman for the Department for Children Schools and Families who reckons that teachers boycotting SATS would be "unlawful".

So - Don't bother considering the legitimate concerns of teachers about how these ridiculous tests get in the way of them doing their jobs (ie. teaching kids, rather than generating test scroes). Ignore the fact that most parents deplore SATS too and that kids are developing stress-related illneses because of them.

No, why bother even thinking about such serious issues when you can just wave your hand dismissively and write off any action against them as "unlawful"?! I guess that's easily done in a country whose anti-union laws are, as Tony Blair used to boast, the strictest in western Europe.

But in this case, the government may be arrogantly exaggerating the extent of these oppressive laws. Even the NUT's senior lawyer - renowned as a man who will defer to the law whenever possible - reckons that the boycott would not fall foul of the law. He states that, "If there was any serious question about the lawfulness we wouldn't be doing it."

Which may be reassuring in this particular case, but in general is not very reassuring at all.

Prison Officers Propose Strikes For Trade Union Freedom

The Prison Officers' Association has submitted an excellent resolution on trade union freedom to this year's TUC Congress. Marking a change from the annual charade of passing a resolution denouncing the anti-union laws but doing little concrete about it, the POA proposes a series of one-day general strikes to demand trade union freedom.

No doubt, the TUC bureaucracy will bring megatonnes of pressure to bear on the POA to withdraw the final paragraph. Let's hope they are tough enough to resist. And should anyone fear that such strikes would be illegal, just stop and ask yourself ... Who exactly is going to lock us all up?!

P05 Trade union freedom

Congress recognises the level of work carried out by the General Council in an attempt to progress the Congress resolutions that called for a more modern, fair and appropriate approach to trades union rights in our country.

Further, Congress places on record its appreciation to all those academic lawyers and MPs who sought to take the Trade Union Freedom Bill through the Parliamentary process, but expresses its disbelief at the Labour Government which choose to talk the Bill out of time, in order to ensure that the Bill fell. This act of “political sabotage” is unworthy of any Government, but particularly a Labour Government.

Congress recognises that the actions of the TUC and affiliated unions have had no success to date in persuading the Government to amend legislation to return the fundamental rights of all workers. In fact, Government has taken even more draconian legislative action to stifle trade unions.

Therefore, Congress instructs the TUC to organise a series of one-day general strikes until such time as the Government removes the restrictive anti-trade union legislation from statute.

Keeping Effective Trade Unionism Illegal

So I get home from supporting a strike (pictured) to read that New Labour even in its death throes is holding out against workers' right to strike.

Existing law makes us jump through hoop after hoop to even hold a legal strike, while employers have every right they need to undermine workers' action. London Underground, for example, will keep the three striking stations open tomorrow with managers and admin staff hastily issued with the necessary certificates whether or not they are genuinely competent to run a railway station safely. We have to give them advance warning of our tactics; they have to give us nothing of the sort. They can sack Jerome for nothing more than refusing to be a punchbag at work; our only recourse is strike action, and then they get to render it ineffective.

And that is just how New Labour wants to keep it. Even as they head like a juggernaut with failed brakes towards electoral defeat, they still fear effective legal trade unionism more than they fear a Tory government.

And yet, when you would think the unions could do nothing other than denounce Blair/Brownism and force an about-turn in their disastrous anti-working-class policies, what do their leaders do? Issue a joint statement with the Labour leadership welcoming the outcome of the policy forum. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said: "We have moved forward on a package that covers a wide range of areas that the British electorate wants to see addressed."

It is a really over-cooked cliche, but this really is the stuff(ing) of turkeys issuing a joint statement with Bernard Matthews welcoming Christmas.

TUC Monday afternoon - Trade Union freedom

Here at Congress, debates have to squeeze their way in between speeches from visiting worthies and TUC back-slapping sessions. But on Monday afternoon, a very important debate did squeeze its way in - on trade union rights and freedom.

Proposing, Bob Crow pointed out that Gordon Brown's speech had made not one promise to extend trade union rights. He plugged the forthcoming RMT strike on One rail in defence of a sacked guard, and pointed out that the employer will be using managers from different sections and companies to help them break the strike through scabbing. If bosses have the right to take solidarity action, then so should workers. Bob also encouraged delegates to come to the rally against the anti-union laws on 18th October.

Seconding, Brian Caton of the Prison Officers Association quoted Gordon Brown's speech from earlier in the day - "no injustice can last forever". Prison officers are denied trade union rights, but are still determined to fight privatisation and underfunding of the prison service. Interestingly, Brian blamed violent reoffending on the lack of government funding and support for rehabilitation programmes in prisons.

Steve Kemp of the National Union of Mineworkers argued that because of the anti-union laws, "Unions have been taken over by lawyers and judges". He reminded Congress of the Gate Gourmet strike two years ago - when Heathrow baggage handlers took solidarity action, the anti-union laws "came to the rescue of the employer". While the media decries 'wildcat strikes', Steve decried 'wildcat employers' and 'wildcat judges'.

A CWU speaker described how the anti-union laws were affecting their current dispute. The employer can use scab labour, but it is illegal for the union to picket the depot that labour comes from to dissuade the scabs, because that would count as 'secondary picketing'.

This subject comes back to Congress every year. Two reasons. One, its continuing importance. Two, the TUC does so little about it from one Congress year to the next. The POA had some text in the composite that asserted that the TUC must campaign for its policies even when the government opposes them (especially when the government opposes them, you might think). It shouldn't need to be said, but it strikes at the core of where the TUC is going wrong. Whether it is on the Trade Union Freedom Bill, the minimum wage, agency workers, Trident replacement or a host of other policies, the TUC must stop acting like a beaten dog that keeps crawling back to its abusive owner.

Oh, and the composite on trade union rights and freedom was passed unanimously. Most things do. Mostly, the General Council 'supports'. Sometimes it 'supports with reservations'. Occasionally, it 'opposes'. I wonder whether there should be a new category: 'supports with no intention of implementing'.