The London Underground doesn't set the standard for much, but it boasts perhaps the worst post-Thatcher industrial relations in Britain. Led by old-style bruiser Bob Crow, the RMT is still very much a beer and sandwiches union, give or take the sandwiches. Its take-no-prisoners attitude to strike action has earned it a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the travelling public.
People often say to me, "Why are they always on strike? They earn good money," as though these two things were unrelated. In fact, wages for most frontline staff are not excessive. Only the drivers and supervisors earn over £30,000. Station staff start on around £20,000, which sounds pretty good given the non-existent skill requirement, until you factor in the fact that over half your work will be done during unsocial hours: early mornings, late evenings, weekends, public holidays—which would, in most other jobs, be paid at a higher rate. This is why strikes are often called for public holidays—the union knows that members would rather not work these days anyway, for which they receive no extra money.
Mistrust and skulduggery have been the norm for many years in union-management relations. What is promised with one hand all too often vanishes with a wave of the other. This is why we are still arguing over implementation of the 35-hour week, seven years after it was first agreed—the recent strikes were over the imposition of new working rotas, which London Underground says are linked to the 35-hour week.
Today's more aggressive RMT position is partly the result of a deal in the early 1990s to radically change working practices which the union feels hit it disproportionately hard. The workforce was cut by 5,000 over eight years while passenger numbers increased by 25 per cent. Since then, Jimmy Knapp, and latterly Bob Crow, have steered the union into a more confrontational stance, backed by huge majorities in every ballot, and pay and conditions have maintained a steady improvement. RMT members only have to look at their colleagues on the privatised buses to see what union weakness means in practice—poor pay and an atmosphere of petty harassment.
The main reason strikes tend to cause so much disruption is that the loss of a small number of drivers has a hugely disproportionate effect. Some station staff happily scab on strike days, safe in the knowledge that the service will be non-existent anyway, thus saving themselves docked wages. This does not go down at all well with the drivers, who take a somewhat steely view, possibly engendered by sitting in a tunnel all day.
But another reason for the RMT's strength comes, ironically, from Lon-don Underground's assiduous court-ship of the rival union TSSA, the old clerk's association. Infamous for having never called a strike since 1926, TSSA acts as a union for members who might need representation at a disciplinary hearing, for example, but who don't want to lose money on strike days. They still, of course, get the benefit of the RMT's hard-won battles.
But rather than divide and conquer, the net effect is to siphon the moderates away from the RMT, leaving it squarely in the hands of the radicals, communists and other Evening Standard bogeymen.
Even Ken Livingstone fell out with this most militant union, apparently calling Bob Crow a "thug" and urging members to cross their own picket lines. Livingstone, who appears to have left the Labour party a socialist and returned a Blairite, has not yet patched up relations with what were until recently his firmest supporters. He is not the first to find Crow menacing. One staunch RMT member told me that Crow and cohorts reminded him of Goodfellas. But, he thought, just the men for such a dirty job.
Things came a bit unstuck in the recent strike. The station staff were called out on New Year's eve without the drivers, who have long had a 35-hour week. Predictably, the outcome was mixed. This may have wider repercussions: unlike the French, for example, Britons seem to respect the right to strike only if it isn't exercised.
When a strike is called for a day you'd rather have off, such as—to take an example completely at random—New Year's day, the days leading up to it are fraught with expectation. As the two sides bluff and counterbluff their willingness to take and ride out the action respectively, the workforce holds its breath. All too often, a day due to be spent in bed has been thwarted by overzealous negotiators striking a last-minute deal. On one occasion the strike was called off at six o'clock the evening before. It would have been my last day of work before a week off. I was already in the pub when I heard of the cancellation on the news. Bollocks to it, I decided; I stayed in drinking, ignored the phone calls the next morning, and claimed I'd never heard it had been called off. Suspicious but uncertain, my managers settled for docking me a day's annual leave. And from then on, whenever a strike is called off, they phone me with my own news service.
