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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 178 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 178, September 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The continuing rail strike has put working class struggle and union organisation to the top of the political agenda.
Suddenly the power of the working class is visible to everyone, as 4,500 signal workers stop the vast majority of trains, causing chaos in the big cities and losing employers millions of pounds. Unlike many other recent strikes the rail strike is impossible for the media and the government to ignore.
The government and employers stumbled into the strike early in the summer. They assumed one of two things – or possibly both – would happen: the signal workers would tire of the action as it dragged on and would start returning to work; and that the strike would be unpopular, so pushing Jimmy Knapp towards a settlement.
No wonder, then, that the Tories and their allies now seem without a strategy to end the strike. So far they have pulled back from escalation of the strike. They look back admiringly at Ronald Reagan’s sacking of the US air traffic controllers in the early 1980s and their replacement by military controllers. But they have no such trained replacements, so such a strategy would close down the whole rail system for months. Even the option of individual contracts looks fraught for them and has been resisted so far by the signal workers.
Support for the strike has also been widespread among other workers and even from commuters. Collections for the signal workers elicit a good response, and opinion polls show continuing support.
The employers have no clear strategy of winning. The ostensible reason for continuing with the dispute is that to do otherwise would breach the government’s pay policy. The pay policy which caused the strike was itself a blunder, embarked upon in order to hold down further tax increases at last year’s budget.
The government and employers are also finding it much harder to turn other workers against the rail workers. Partly this is because of the obvious merits of their case, and the fact that more money is lost on every strike day than it would cost to settle the dispute at the original 5.7 percent offer. But it is also because of the continuing unpopularity of the government and bosses.
The decline in support for the Thatcherite Tories has been matched by a rising contempt for the entrepreneurs who enriched themselves so much in the 1980s. The Tories are hardly likely to win the argument about the signal workers being well paid when there are almost daily announcements about the scale of bosses’ pay rises in recent years – up 23 percent for finance sector bosses last year, while their equivalents in manufacturing industry managed ‘only’ 10 percent and most workers are told to settle for 1.5 percent. Barclays Bank profits at £1 billion for half a year, and favourable treatment from the water and electricity ‘regulators’ which allows their profits and directors’ salaries to stay at record levels have all helped create a profound scepticism. The strike has also brought back with a bang speculation about a Labour election victory. Tony Blair’s election as leader has been hailed as the greatest breakthrough Labour has gained in decades.
The accepted view of Blair’s success is that he is a right wing moderniser who has distanced himself from the unions and so appeals to the middle classes. By this analysis the rail strike should harm Labour’s popularity but it has done exactly the opposite. Maybe there are votes in some of the more traditional Labour policies.
Growing numbers of Labour supporters seem to think so. MP Peter Hain recently made a plea in the New Statesman for the party leadership to pay attention to its activists and to return to some basic socialist policies.
Blair’s message certainly could hardly be more dull or cautious with its vague commitment to ‘fairness’ and its following of the Tory agenda on crime, support for the Criminal Justice Bill and attacks on single parents. Labour clearly thinks it is sufficient to simply attack high directors’ salaries or hospital closures without actually doing anything. But the danger with this strategy can be seen in the rail strike.
The RMT executive is fighting the dispute in the most defensive way. It puts emphasis on public support and according to Jimmy Knapp – winning the support of the bosses’ organisation the CBI. However popular this strike is it is clear that the government wants to sit it out and is prepared to pay over the odds to defeat the signal workers.
The union should not just sit there and hope that they will eventually be the victors. It needs to escalate the dispute. If the series of one and two day strikes had been one indefinite strike, it would almost certainly have won by now. And support should be forthcoming from the rest of the Labour movement.
The employers are clearly in league with the government and backed up by the press. Yet the TUC has done nothing so far for the strikers, and Labour has been equivocal about supporting the strike – even though Knapp is president of the TUC and the union’s negotiator, Vernon Hince, is on Labour’s NEC.
If the strike is to win, and if Labour’s poll lead is to mean anything real, then the sympathy and anger have to be turned into action and solidarity.
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