Pix-&-Vidz of the RMT Tube Strike – Thu 11 Jun 09

Dateline: RMT Picket Line, Seven Sisters, London, UK, 13:00, Thu 11 Jun 09 – On the second day of the London Underground Two Day Strike, pickets from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers stake out an autonomous space for Industrial Direct Action, outside Transport for London’s new Pleiades House offices in Westerfield Road, N15 5LD. With red and green flags flying high, a BBQ replacing the more traditional brazier, and toots of support from passing drivers, the strikers were in high good spirits at the success of their action, while remaining angry at their betrayal by the class traitors in ASLEF HQ.

A1. Direct Action Party promotes Industrial Direct Action

C5. Liverpool Street station @ 14:30

C4. Seven Sisters tube station @ 14:15

C3. Picket Line Chatter

C1. Colourful shimmering RMT flags

B7. Where ASLEF drivers clock on for Victoria Line shifts

B6. Autonomous flag breaks up cop/boss confab

B5. Cops & Bosses vs. Striking Workers

B4. Get the message?

B3. Big Sticker Duo Too

B2. Pleiades Picket – Big Sticker Duo

B1. RMT Picket Camp Location

A2. St James' Park tube station @ 09:10

V1. Title screen from “Tube Strike 09 – The Word from the Picket Line”

Video @ YouTube
• Tube Strike 09 – The Word from the Picket Line
» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDtIvlhpOl0


Quick Acronym Glossary & Dramatis Personæ
ASLEF – the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen – the trade union representing train drivers in the UK, including tube train drivers
ASLEF bosses – the class traitors who wrote to their tube train driver members, instructing them to cross the RMT picket lines during the strike
LUL – London Underground Ltd – the tube bosses, a wholly owned subsidiary of TfL since 2003
RMT – the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers – the strikers’ trade union
TfL – Transport for London – the big bosses, a statutory corporation responsible for most aspects of the transport system in Greater London, run by a board and a commissioner appointed by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the current Mayor of London (and Tory party arch-buffoon)
Tube – the London underground railway system, run by lions – RMT and ASLEF members – and managed by donkeys – LUL and TfL


Supporting Striking Tube Workers
On Tuesday evening I zipped straight down from the Radical Anthropology Group’s evening class in Camden to try to catch the strike-opening RMT Picket at Kings Cross, but alas was too late. Wednesday saw the websites of fledgling direct action movement “THE Labour Party” – thelabourparty.info & thelabourparty.pbworks.com – updated with solidarity graphics, strike-supporting links, and a copy of my go-get-em message to rmtlondoncalling.org.uk/supportus:

“Though less than a week old, THE Labour Party fully supports Striking Tube Workers in their militant stand against the bullying, pay-slashing, job-cutting bosses of TfL and LUL. Our websites (thelabourparty.info & thelabourparty.pbworks.com) are fronted with a solidarity graphic that links to “Tube Workers’ Strike: Support Information” at IndyMedia London. Billions of quid for war and bankers bailouts cf. bullying and peanuts for essential transport workers – what better indicator that we need to heed THE Labour Party strapline: [TUBE] “LABOUR – TAKE THE POWER!” could you come across? Strike action is industrial direct action, and the more we do it, the better we get at it, the more power to shape our future we attain. More power to your elbow, the lot of yez!” 
Source: thelabourparty.info/london-tube-strike

So Thursday was picket line visiting day. Following the Strike Support Group’s info, I discovered that unfortunately both TfL offices in Victoria at Albany House 55 Broadway and Windsor House on Victoria Street were bereft of pickets shortly after 09:00. Thankfully a 3.5G mobile phone and a linux palmtop got me the low down – pickets at Arnos Grove on the Piccadilly Line and Seven Sisters on the Victoria Line were both up and running and well attended; my thanks to Martin, Unjum, Dean, and Geoff for your help in establishing how to avoid another wild goose chase. Then folding bike + bus + overground train got me to TfL’s new Pleiades House offices in Westerfield Road, N15.  


On The Picket Line
Stationed (bad pun intended ;-) right outside the gate of Pleiades House, strikers from the RMT’s Finsbury Park Branch 0543 had a canny camp set up, with gazebo, flags and a BBQ in place of the more traditional oil drum brazier. A few metres away, an LUL management cabal colluded with a pair of cops in a confab. Historical aside – apparently, back when the building at the south end of Westerfield Road had been a mail sorting office, posties on strike would use the same spot for their picket camp.

The pickets were mightily pissed off, as well they should be, with the union bosses at ASLEF, who sent out a letter to their tube train driving members encouraging them to cross the RMT picket lines and work normally during the RMT’s strike. Thankfully however, the working class solidarity instinct of most ASLEF tube train drivers overcame this traitorous invitation to scab on their work-mates’ strike, and as one picket told me, “They’ve been turning up here, taking one look at our picket line, and driving away again.”  

Prior talks with two RMT officials had made it clear that LUL and TfL might use an interview with an identifiable striker on a picket line as grounds for their further abusing the disciplinary system, by charging such a rank-&-file militant for “bringing the company into disrepute”. I spoke of this with the strikers and one of them suggested as to how there were workarounds available, ironically citing Thatcher’s broadcast news ban on Sinn Fein/IRA spokespersons voicing their own opinions (the BBC, ITN, et al had to get an actor in to actually say the spokesperson’s words). Since we both felt that “it’s quite important to hear the views of folks who are actually making the strike work on the ground”, we agreed to record a voice-only interview off-camera, with the proviso that the striker’s words would be voiced-over before uploading to YouTube. You can read the transcript of that interview, not attributable to any particular striker, below my sig.


Whatever Next?
I recommend another Government of the Dead protest production:
“New” Labour Zombie Lunchtime Lurch
• Date: Thu 18 Jun 09, 13:00 & lurching onwards to 15:00
• Rendezvous: “New” Labour Party HQ, 39 Victoria St, London, SW1H 0HA
• Shout Out: Brown barely survived the Parliamentary Labour Party meeting on Mon 08 Jun 09. Since he’s hanging on for grim death, we can look forward to a period of “Zombie Dead Man Walking” government in the run up to an election. Can we take the power to the streets? YES WE CAN!!
• Who/What:The Government of the Dead will be sending a whole lurch of zombies down there to “New” Labour Party HQ on Thu 18 Jun, from 13:00 lunchtime, when zombies could be hungry. Zombies are not known for their sense of direction, so they could head off to Parliament and Downing Street at a slow shuffle, or they might end up staggering across St James' Park to Buckingham Palace, demanding to be dissolved and put out of their misery.
• Dress Code: this can be ordinary clothes, but torn up or bloodstained is a good look, especially with trendy blairite suits; on the other hand, why not go for the gothic?
• Makeup: green/white pale skin, good healthy look for a zombie, blood, wounds, sores all recommended; PVC glue gives good skin-peel effect.
• Locomotion: SLOW, gets there in the end.
» Location & Public Transport Map: tinyurl.com/NLZLL-map 
» Facebook Event Page: tinyurl.com/NLZLL-FB 
» Web: tinyurl.com/GotDead-future 

Up the Revolution,

Tim Dalinian Jones



RMT Picket Line Interview Transcript

Tim: “This is an interview on the Pleiades House RMT Picket Line, in Westfield Road, at 13:38, Thursday 11th of June [2009], and the voice of the person I’m interviewing will be voiced-over before it’s released to the public domain. So, what’s going on here today, then?”

Striker: “Well, today’s the second day of our 48 hour strike. We’re just going in to the last few hours of what I would describe as a very effective, very successful strike. It’s obviously been overshadowed and utilised by the behaviour of our comrades in ASLEF. Nonetheless, those members who are members of RMT have shown once again how disappointed they are with the type of management we have, and how angry they are, especially on the Victoria Line, about the sacking of our colleagues, and the issue about the abuse of disciplinary hearings, and other conducts that management are carrying out – such as refusing to upgrade our safety of our trains, and breaking agreements that might result in the redundancy of a substantial amount of people.

Tim: “These are the people that are come over from Metronet?”

Striker: “Well, I think the better way of to think of it is not so that they come over [from] Metronet but that they are ex-LUL staff [Tim: “ Reunited!”] who were – well yes! The journey started with them being removed from the LUL family, into a disastrous process that we told them was disastrous. People should remember the name of John Prescott and people like that, and Gordon Brown, as being the architects of a dishonest system called PPP – Public Private Partnership – which has resulted in the theft of public money that we won’t get back, and now as a result of that big failure, they’re bringing those staff back in-house, and are then trying to tell them that they can’t retain their jobs, simply because management in Metronet have expanded the workforce, and they’re now trying to say that we’re overstaffed ’cause they’re duplicating the work. Well, it’s two different companies being merged, and there’s two different lots of workloads needed, and if you start getting rid of people on that basis, you’re going to get rid of all of us. 

Tim: “And an injury to one is, after all, an injury to all.”

Striker: “The idea that they can tell us all, ‘Oh, it’s only management!’, as if ‘management’ are not workers as well, is extremely offensive. Unfortunately, there’s so much offensive going on, perhaps we’ve not paid enough attention to that, to make sure we deal with that point. But a worker is a worker, they earn a living, they’re a human being, and they deserve to be treated fairly, and as you said, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. 

Tim: “Presumably you followed what was happening on Monday and Tuesday in the negotiations in the run-up to the strike quite closely. What do you think of the way that the deal was being typed up at ACAS when, apparently, management got a call from someone higher up and decided to renege on the deal that they’d almost put in place to stop the strike happening?  

Striker: “It’s clear that they did that on the basis that they feel they were able to bounce our sister union into repudiating any FUTURE action of their members. In other words...

Tim: “Is that ASLEF you’re talking about?”

Striker: “ASLEF has repudiated its members action BEFORE they’ve taken action. They’ve sent out letters telling their members to cross picket lines BEFORE we had set up a picket line. They have sent out letters telling people to cross our picket lines...

Tim: “Pre-emptive scabbing!”

Striker: “Exactly! So, having that assurance, for want of a better word, from the national leadership of ASLEF, and with their local representatives running around telling people that they HAVE TO come in, management felt reassured, and that they could tear up any deal that had been agreed. So I think what was happening is, while LUL negotiators may even say that they were negotiating in good faith, were negotiating in one corner, Boris Johnson and his cohorts were making deals with ASLEF in another corner, and – on the basis of having a deal with ASLEF – they cut the ground from under us and cut the ground from under the public support for our strike action. So they’ve tried to cut the ground from under us with public opinion, but I don’t think they have succeeded. They may find a few “Ms Angry from Cheltenham”, but I don’t believe the vast majority of the public has been duped into thinking that Boris Johnson or LUL management is any sort of honest brokers. 


Andrew Dismore MP (Hendon, “New” Labour) said Mr Johnson, the Mayor of London, had "interfered" and caused a planned suspension of the strike to be lifted. He told the Commons that the RMT union had signed an agreement on Tuesday evening to stop the strike going ahead. But just 35 minutes later, LUL management told the union they had made a phone call and could no longer abide by the agreement, he said. During Commons exchanges on upcoming business, Mr Dismore said: "Could we have a debate to establish exactly to whom that phone call was made because there's a real suspicion that the Mayor of London's fingers are all over the provocation of this dispute. I think members ought to be aware if the Mayor of London interfered in this and caused the suspension of the strike to be lifted."
Source: Mayor 'provoked Tube strike', by Emily Ashton, Press Association, in The Independent, Thu 11 Jun 09

Tim: “Yeah, the interviews with disgruntled travellers are ten-a-penny in the mainstream media, but I think it’s quite important to hear the views of folks who are actually making the strike work on the ground. So you think it was the kinda partial success of the bosses divide-&-rule tactic to split ASLEF and the RMT that led to that rather useless drama on Tuesday night?

Striker: “We’ve had two strikes on the Victoria line which were reported as being solid, and were solid, with the exception of, first, five out of 280 drivers coming in to scab, and, for the second one, three out of 280 coming in. So, I think in any description of the word, I think that qualifies for solid. We had that success, not because ASLEF Head Office instructed their members not to cross picket lines or even intimated to them that it was a Point of Principle not crossing another trade unions picket lines. That was successful because ASLEF’s members decided not to cross picket lines. Indeed, the only thing that was missing, probably because they couldn’t get a deal around it, was a letter from ASLEF – which I think was done, by the way. I think a letter from ASLEF was done to the Victoria Line strikers, but the members were so enraged, the union reps to some degree felt that rage and supported it – local union leaders, and therefore did not regard any letter, any pre-repudiation letter, any letter to undermine our situation. So, in essence, I just see something there to deal with, but anyway...  

Tim: “Well, I think that’s really good news, because there’s always been this tension, in British unions in particular, between the people who are making a nice living being paid full-time by the union – who want to try and make sure that their living is maintained into the future – and the rank-&-file workers who are up against real managements – who have real issues with them – who NEED the backup of a solid, proper union who’s going to back them when they need to go into dispute and take industrial action. And what’s heartening to me to hear is that it’s actually rank-&-file ASLEF members on the ground, who work alongside you guys everyday, that a lot of them (I’ve heard from another of your comrades here) have turned up, seen the picket line, and gone home again – rather than do what their union bosses have said and cross your picket line. And that sort of grassroots solidarity I think is what’ll help you win.

Striker: “It has to be remembered that never has ASLEF ever instructed its members NOT to cross a picket line – never. Yeah? During the time of Mick Rix, one of their leaders, all that he did was not say anything, which is better than instructing people to scab. So therefore, at the end of the day, it hasn’t been a leadership-led solidarity in this dispute or any other. As you say, it’s actually the members defying their leadership that’s actually led to solidarity support. 

Tim: “Good! Well, I’m pleased to hear that what’s happening on the ground is very different from what the people in the [ASLEF bosses’ HQ] offices might like to happen.”

Interview closed with another striker enquiring “How’s the food getting on?”, since we were standing right next to the BBQ! Mmmmm, BBQ... <drools> NOM NOM NOM!!



Footnotes

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