London Underground Strike.

On Wednesday June 10th and Thursday June 11th the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) staged a 48 hour walk out on London's Underground rail network, the Tube. It was probably a bad time to stage a strike because Wednesday saw and England World Cup qualifying game being played at Wembley stadium. This meant the only thing most people in the country and possibly the world got to hear about the RMT and the strike was that it was making life very difficult for a large number of people. Plus after the events of the last couple of weeks even the politic ans were getting a bit bored of politics. In spite of this one thing that really bothered me about the strike was that a lot of the commuters interviewed about it on TV had little sympathy for the RMT because they thought they were on strike to secure even better pay and conditions. This simply isn't the case.

Back in 2002 a fresh faced, young chancellor called Gordon Brown had the bright idea of part privatising the Underground network using something called a Public Private Partnership (PPP). This involved setting up a private company called Metronet to carry out maintenance work on the network. At the time everybody said that this was a very bad idea that was going to go horribly, horribly wrong and lots of protest sprang up to stop it from happening. Leading the opposition to the plan was the RMT. Eventually when it became clear that Brown was incapable of listening to reason the RMT turned round and said; "We know Metronet is going to fail so when it collapses and the work needs to be taken back into public ownership can we have a clause in the contract that protects our members jobs?" In their arrogance that the plan was going to succeed the Government agreed and signed up to a no compulsory redundancy clause.

In July 2007 Metronet went bankrupt and the whole thing had to be brought back into public ownership at a cost of around £500m to the taxpayer. As part of this bailout the government turned round to the RMT and informed them that they were going to tear up the no compulsory redundancy clause and make a lot of Tube maintenance workers redundant. The RMT obviously turned round and decided they were going to fight them so the strike wasn't about improving pay and conditions it was about making sure that a lot of workers didn't have to lose their jobs in order to allow the government to get away with yet another massive cock up. To me that is exactly what a trade union is meant to be doing.