I want to see the jobs of rail workers protected and their pay enhanced, but the way to get there is by embracing change

 
An eerily quiet concourse at London Victoria. It may well be that the chill of half empty commuter trains is proving a reality check for rail workers at TOCs serving the London commuter market

 
Now is the summer of our discontent,

Made possible by the RMT.

OK, less poetic than Shakespeare, but sadly more topical as we see the storm clouds of strikes gathering. We are facing the biggest national rail strike since 1982. The issues, it seems, relate to pay, pensions and conditions. In other words, just about everything.

I have been using the railway a lot in the last month, from my house in Lewes to London, and further afield as well, such as to Liverpool last week. It is heartening to see the trains and stations bustling again. My trains from Lewes in particular seem markedly busier than they were pre-pandemic with hardly a seat free on eight-coach off-peak trains.

On-peak, of course, the story is less rosy with many former commuters happy to work from home for at least part of the week. In addition, the inter-city first class business market has pretty much dried up which requires a big increase in off-peak leisure passengers to make up that shortfall in income.

The world has changed and it is not reverting to its pre-2019 shape any time soon, if at all. There is a strong future for rail, but only if it adapts to the new reality.

In my last contribution to Passenger Transport, I set out why the regime of engineering works needs to change to reflect changing travel patterns. What also needs to change are the working patterns of those employed in the industry.

When workers are faced with inevitable change, a common first reaction is to resist it. You can see that as far back as the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the introduction of the spinning jenny which reduced the number of cotton workers needed.

On the railways, when steam gave way to diesel, there was a reluctance to let go of the firemen (the ‘f’ in ASLEF) and initially they were kept on in the cab, largely it seems just to keep an eye on the oil gauge. That was clearly unsustainable.

An immediate issue today relates to rosters and the way weekend working has been treated. When those working conditions were set, the weekend, especially Sunday, was a dead time for travel. Sundays were days when shops were closed, sporting events did not take place, and you ventured out only for a walk or to go to church. We are now in a seven-day world, and rail is a seven-day operation. Indeed, some weekend days now rival weekdays for passenger levels.

Under these circumstances, it is simply not tenable to treat weekend days as something special. Shop workers, those handling sporting events, doctors and nurses, and many more, they all work at weekends without 1950s-style supplements.

Unions are important. Without them, pay and conditions for the average worker would be worse. The right to withdraw labour is a fundamental right in a democracy. Moreover, it is right to acknowledge that our railway workers kept the country moving during Covid while many others were sheltering at home, afraid to go out. And also that they have been subject to a pay freeze for a couple of years, and now inflation is roaring away.

Yet the defence of workers cannot be the fossilisation of terms and conditions that were set long ago in a different world. I want to see the jobs of rail workers protected and their pay enhanced, but the way we get there is to embrace change, to win passengers for the railways, not to try like King Canute to hold back the tide.

The last thing we need is a strike that cripples the railway and chokes off the recovery in passenger numbers we have been seeing. Yet that, it seems, is what we are likely to get.

So the last thing we need is a strike that cripples the railway and chokes off the recovery in passenger numbers we have been seeing. Yet that, it seems, is what we are likely to get.

We will from next week have strikes on the Tube, despite a very generous pay settlement having been reached. And yet Transport for London has proposed no changes to pension arrangements and has pledged that there will be no forced job losses. This RMT action looks increasingly like a strike in search of a cause.

It was frankly depressing to hear Mick Lynch from the RMT on the radio the other day, almost revelling in the ability of the RMT to shut the railway down. His language, his evocation of the 1926 General Strike, his talk of class warfare, all sounded like a throwback to the early 1970s.

I came away from that interview with the clear impression that what the RMT is proposing has a political dimension above and beyond the immediate issues for their members.

ASLEF, on the other hand, seems to me to have a narrower and more laser-like focus, and is simply determined to get the best deal possible for its members, as any union worth its salt should. Indeed it has been exceedingly effective at doing so over many years, such that the train drivers in this country are among the best paid in the world.

It was interesting to see the results of the RMT ballot. There was a lower turnout and much weaker support for strike action from those employed by TOCs serving the commuter market around London and indeed on Southern, which serves my town, there was a vote only for action short of a strike. It may well be that the chill of half empty commuter trains is proving a reality check for rail workers in those TOCs, who recognise the fragility of the railway’s finances and the need for change. If so, then they have a firmer grip on reality than their union bosses.

Now I do not support this government, but in fairness it has to be recognised that they have poured billions of taxpayers’ money into rail to prop it up through the pandemic and are still doing so although fare income remains significantly down. They also cut fares through a ticket “sale”, which people like me were encouraging them to do. The government has, I think, a right to expect genuine discussions about changes to help put rail finances back on an even keel.

And I certainly do not support this prime minister, whose general behaviour has been shoddy in the extreme. But the fact is that he personally has been more supportive of putting money into rail than his chancellor who has a much less benevolent view towards rail. It seems likely the prime minister may not last much longer and while that may well be justified, it has to be faced that any Tory replacement may well be less inclined to support rail than he has been.

There are, unfortunately, quite a few leading Tories who would relish a bust-up with the unions and whose first instinct is to try to force rail workers by law to stay at their post

There are, unfortunately, quite a few leading Tories who would relish a bust-up with the unions and whose first instinct is to try to force rail workers by law to stay at their post. That of course would be a flagrant breach of the right to strike as well as being incendiary. More to the point, it simply would not work. Is the idea to force rail workers at gunpoint to turn up? And even if they did, what guarantee would there be that they would not simply refuse to carry out their duties?

There was a long article in The Times on May 28 headed “Union railmen stick up for Kremlin” which did a bit of a hatchet job on leading RMT officials. I wonder where the material for that piece came from?

No, what we really do not need is a sequel to the miners’ strike of the 1980s, where implacable political positions were adopted, in that case by Scargill and Thatcher.

Our rail workers deserve a decent pay increase, not least given where inflation is taking us. But in return they need to recognise that the goalposts have moved, and a good future for rail has to respond to the needs and wishes of passengers today, not those that existed pre-pandemic.
Most of all, both sides need to recognise that inconveniencing the very people upon whom the future of the railway depends – the passengers – makes no sense at all.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Norman Baker served as transport minister from May 2010 until October 2013. He was Lib Dem MP for Lewes between 1997 and 2015.

 
This story appears inside the latest issue of Passenger Transport.

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