Thanks to the tube strike I’ve been cycling to and from work these past couple of days. Nice. It’s not been raining and I always enjoy cycling between rows of gridlocked cars.
The seven-mile journey from west London takes about 35 minutes, five minutes longer than the London Underground does when it’s working normally.
I keep a bike at the office for use in central London and one at home for local use. So news that the RMT union has called off the remaining two days of this week’s promised strike comes as a mixed blessing. No more healthy commute along the (flat) Thames flood plain. As for “normal service” that means normal signal failures, the chief curse of this creaking system which routinely involves unexplained stops in tunnels. But I will resume my phone-and-TV-free half hour twice daily to read my newspapers, longer if the signals play up.
Unless you were affected directly, the tube strike may be of no interest. What’s more important – beyond the capital – is why the RMT called this stoppage? The union obeyed the law, staged a ballot of its members (we’ll get back to that) and may strike again later. But it’s not at all clear why Bob Crow, the RMT’s general secretary and his executive, didn’t accept the management’s assurances on job security, transfer of entitlements and pensions, as the two other unions involved did.
Behind the dispute is the collapse of Metronet, the public private partnership (PPP) group that won the contract to modernise two-thirds of the network. Mayor Ken Livingstone resisted chancellor Brown’s model for PPP – but lost in the courts.
Tubelines, the firm that won the other contract, is doing well, I’m told. Metronet, which is handling the lines I use, has been rubbish. Commuters get the impression that it did the easy stuff – my station has been repainted and has new lights – but ploughed the hard bits.
It went into administration following a £2bn overspend and the arbitrator’s refusal to give them lots more money. Good: PPP is supposed to be about shifting the burden of risk to the private contractor, though neither Brown nor Livingstone can let the transport network go belly up, so we pay in the long run.
Hence the row. Mr Crow wanted “copper bottomed” assurances that his members’ pay and conditions will not be affected when the Metronet mess is sorted out and – probably – Transport for London (TfL) takes the contract back in-house, as Mayor Ken wanted in the first place.
According to all the parties except Mr Crow, they got those assurances last week. “Other than open a vein and write it in blood, I don’t see what more can be said,” explained the mayor in his inimitable way. It’s never wise to pontificate on the details of someone else’s dispute, but the union decided last night it was satisfied with what management calls “explanations” – not concessions.
So why strike? Why do so, too, on such a slender ballot mandate as the RMT has? Of its 2,300 Metronet engineering members, 1,123 voted yes to the strike call, only 20 voted no. By my calculation, some 1,257 didn’t vote either way. You can draw whatever conclusions you like from that, but it’s not a full-throated call to the barricades as mandates go.
Mr Crow, an ex-communist, Millwall FC supporter and past ally of Arthur Scargill’s breakaway socialist labour party – the SDP of the left – is by general consent a smart fellow and a tough old-school negotiator. He knows when to pocket his winnings.
Was he under pressure from rivals and colleagues on the executive this time, as today’s FT suggests? Was he flexing the RMT’s muscles to make sure Metronet’s contracts come back in-house? Or showing would-be members what muscle can deliver. The RMT has grown by 20,000-75,000 members since he took over in 2002. Perhaps the executive just wanted to out-leftie Ken, a very unwise ambition.
Talk of widespread serious industrial unrest this winter is probably wishful thinking on the left at next week’s TUC conference, causing undue alarm in the boardrooms. The union world has changed beyond recognition since the winter of discontent gave Mrs Thatcher her mandate for reform in 1978-79; and media talk that London was reduced to “chaos” this week was the usual hyperbole.
Shops were hit; a lot of people were inconvenienced and a lot more probably worked from home on their laptops. I got some cardio-vascular activity. But in a more individualistic society, unions are much weaker than even the militant ones think, because public attitudes have changed. That may be why the RMT ballot got a below-50% turnout.
The mighty Fleet Street print unions walked arrogantly into Rupert Murdoch’s trap at Wapping and are no more. Even Mr Scargill’s willpower couldn’t change the reality on the ground during the miners strike. He wrecked his union and helped close down the deep mining industry in the process. I always felt that that combover of his showed a reluctance to face hard facts.
Unions are smarter nowadays, as they seek to rebuild their role and membership in the post-industrial world. They have to be. Bob Crow must know that: don’t push your luck, Bob. I suspect I’ll not be biking in to the office again this winter.
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