JANUARY 4, 2024
Jeff Slee looks back over his time as a trade union activist on the railways and outlines why the RMT has been such an effective union.
I retired from the railway in 2023, after 39 years. I was an RMT workplace rep, Branch Secretary, Regional Council Chair, and National Executive Committee member.
I was proud to be a member of the RMT. The RMT is admired throughout the labour movement in this country and internationally for our militancy, socialist beliefs, and campaigning. We led the way in the 2022-23 wave of strikes. Our strikes then were over pay; but also against plans by the Train Operating Companies – dictated to by the Department for Transport – to remove train guards, close ticket offices, cut jobs, and worsen terms and conditions, and against Network Rail’s plans to worsen our maintenance workers’ conditions and rosters.
After two years in dispute the DfT and TOCs dropped all their plans. Network Rail’s proposals went back to negotiation, but these have been difficult. RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch won admirers for his plain speaking, and for the way he dealt with media interviews – especially the Newsnight interview where he called fellow interviewee Tory junior minister Chris Philp a liar 15 times without ever raising his voice or losing his cool.
RMT stands for Rail, Maritime, and Transport. Our members – about 80,000 – are mostly in rail: Network Rail, the Train Operating Companies, and Transport for London (London Underground and London Overground). We are also the biggest union among British seafarers. And we have some members in offshore energy (oil rigs), buses, and lorries. The RMT was formed in 1990 from the merger of the NUR (National Union of Railwaymen) and NUS (National Union of Seamen). In my time, our General Secretaries were Jimmy Knapp, Bob Crow, Mick Cash, and now Mick Lynch.
The first reason why we are effective is that we are an industrial union, not a general union nor a craft union. The core of the RMT is the rail industry, where most of our members work, and most of our NEC and officers come from. We organise among all grades of railworkers – cleaners, station staff, maintenance, signalling, traincrew, etc. We are proud of being a union which aims for, as one of our slogans says, “All grades united in a common cause”. That unity is seen in our AGM, NEC, Regional Councils, and most of our branches. It means that our reps and lay activists willingly give their time to help represent and campaign amongst workers in other sectors of the railway. It means that the RMT leadership would find it difficult to play off one section of the membership against another, if they wanted to. Which they don’t.
Although the national rail network was privatised and fragmented 30 years ago, the loyalty of railworkers is to the railway as a whole, not to whichever company employs us, and this loyalty to the industry runs through the RMT.
Of the other rail unions, ASLEF organises only among train drivers, and encourages drivers to see themselves as separate and somewhat superior to other rail workers. As for TSSA, many years ago they were the union for white collar rail workers and managers, but they haven’t had a reason to exist as a separate union since the division between salaried staff and the rest was abolished thirty years ago. Their membership is dropping, and their latest attempt to find a partner to merge with failed when the GMB rejected their advances.
The second reason why the RMT is an effective union is our structure. All our officers – the General Secretaries, two Assistant General Secretaries, 16 Regional Organisers and two Maritime officers – are elected by the membership, not appointed, and have to face re-election every five years. So, they are ultimately accountable to the members, not to the GS. And they come from the RMT membership – all have been union workplace reps, and branch officers.
Our NEC has 16 members: three from Maritime, one from Offshore, and 12 from the ‘General Grades’ (mostly rail). They are all full-time, working at our Head Office (Unity House), so they work day-to-day with the GS, the AGSs, Maritime National Secretary, and union officers. And the accountability of the Officers to the NEC is there every day. Whereas in those unions where the NEC only meets on occasional weekends, it is all too easy for the union bureaucracy to keep things from the NEC or fob them off.
These NEC members are elected for a three-year term, then go back to their old jobs – they can’t stand for re-election when that term is up. So the NEC does not become a clique separated from the membership. In my term on the NEC, I would report back to our quarterly Regional Council meetings, and among the branch delegates present were two of our Region’s former NEC members. Their support and advice was a great help, but their presence meant I always faced knowledgeable questioning and criticism.
Third, the RMT is a socialist union, and proud of it. In Rule 1 of our Rule Book, our aims include: “To work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”. I have never found the word “supersession” in a dictionary. But every union activist knows and believes in what this rule means.
We don’t have an organised right wing in the union, and haven’t had for a long time now. Back in the 1990s, almost no one of significance in the RMT supported Tony Blair and New Labour. Within a few weeks of Blair being elected Party leader, our then full-time officer for the South East– a good man and a good officer, a Labour Party member, but not considered part of the left of the RMT – had taken to calling him “Tory Blur”.
Fourth, we are a militant union. A few years ago, an Assistant General Secretary visited our branch and told us: “Sometimes it’s good to have a strike just so the members know how to do it.” Of course, officers and reps negotiate in good faith with employers. In some companies we have gone years without having to go to a dispute. But the option of taking industrial action is always seriously considered if the results of negotiations are not acceptable. A lot of effort goes into ensuring that our union membership data is up to date, so we are less likely to fall foul of the anti-union laws when we do ballot for action.
In 2017, the Tory government changed the anti-union laws so that every picket must have a ‘picket supervisor’. The picket supervisor had to give prior notice of the time and place of picketing to the police. At the time, our Southern guards were holding strikes against Drivee-Only Operation and we were the first union to face this new requirement. Our workplace reps and branch officers (none of them on full-time release) readily took on this role, and when they went to their local police stations to give notice they found themselves having to explain the new law to them!
I can’t write about the RMT without saying something about Bob Crow. I don’t go in for hero-worship – it is the working class that produces change, not individuals – but he was a great General Secretary and a great man. And one of the best orators I have ever heard. He could explain the class struggle, and the need for socialism, in simple words in a way that inspired those who heard him. And he put his socialist principles into the way the union did things. To give one small example, one of his first decisions after being elected GS was to take the two Head Office cleaners away from the agency that employed them and make them RMT staff, and cancel the union’s contract with the agency.
Bob knew for the RMT to stand up for our members, we had to be prepared, ready, and able to take industrial action if necessary. He found that once employers recognised this, we usually got better results from negotiations without having to use industrial action. When he died, some rail bosses praised him in the media as a great negotiator.
While the RMT is a strong union within Network Rail, the TOCs, and London Underground, we have found it hard to organise other sections of railworkers, such as cleaners. Most train and station cleaning is outsourced, to companies including Mitie, Churchill, and Servest, which other trades unionists will also have come across. We have been campaigning for years to get basic rights and conditions for rail cleaners.
Our union officers and activists put a lot of effort and their own time into recruiting and organising amongst these workers. They represent cleaners in hearings, and encourage cleaner members to become reps. As a result, we are getting gains for these workers. To give one example, London Underground outsource their cleaning to an American company, ABM. We have recently – after years of workplace organising, public campaigning, and political lobbying – managed to get these cleaners company sick pay instead of the much lower Statutory Sick Pay – and free travel on the Tube going to and from work, something that all London Underground Ltd employees get but cleaners did not. And we are continuing to campaign for this cleaning to be brought back in-house.
On the national rail network, we are now in a position where we can ballot cleaner members across different companies for co-ordinated industrial action over pay and conditions. But it is hard to get a Yes vote for action that beats the legal thresholds, and harder still to maintain strike action over a longer period. For many cleaners in the southeast, English is not their first language; they are intimidated by their managers; and when they go on strike the cleaning companies bring in agency workers. And while we call disputes against the cleaning companies, those most responsible for the poor pay and conditions of the cleaners are the train companies, who give the contracts to the outsourced companies and could – but don’t – set minimum standards on pay and conditions, etc.
I am confident that the RMT will continue to be seen as leading the way in the UK trade union movement.
Jeff Slee is a retired rail worker and former RMT National Executive Committee member.
