UK
Industrial action works – Mick Whelan, ASLEF #Lab24
Mick Whelan describes how strong unions continue to defend workers’ rights.
Strikes work
Strikes, they say, don’t work. Well, that’s what the Tories – and right-wing commentators in papers like The Sun, Daily Mail, and Daily Telegraph – would like you to believe. But the truth is that strikes do work. They always have. And they always will. That’s why employers – and the Tories that stand behind the bosses – don’t like them.
Our dispute with 16 train operating companies began back in June 2022 when we first balloted our members for industrial action because they hadn’t had a pay rise since April 2019. It was only six and a half months later and, more pertinently, after six oneday strikes that the train companies finally made us an offer. Then Secretaries of State for Transport Grant Shapps, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, and Mark Harper have all walked through the revolving door at the Department for Transport in the last two years and the Rail Minister, whether Wendy Morton, Kevin Foster, or Huw Merriman, kept parroting the party line that ‘ASLEF should come to the table’. Well, we did. But the table was bare. The companies put nothing on the table until we showed our collective determination to win a rise by going on strike.
It’s that solidarity – collective action – which employers hate. Because, at heart, many bosses are Victorian mill owners who would like to hire and fire as they see fit. They love the idea of the foreman walking along the wharf in the morning saying, “You, you, and you are hired. There’s no work for the rest of you.” They don’t like the ‘burden’, as they see it, of employing men and women. Of paying proper wages. Taxes. National Insurance and pensions. They love the gig economy, false self-employment, and zero hours contracts which the Labour Party in its New Deal for Working People has promised to ban. Bosses like to claim that ‘Zero hours contracts offer workers flexibility.’ But not decent terms and conditions, employment rights, or proper, and secure, jobs.
Fighting MSLs
Because our strikes were successful – in bringing the railway to a standstill – the Tory Government rushed through its Minimum Service Levels (MSL) Act at the end of last year. It had nothing to do with providing a minimum service to the public and everything to do with providing maximum problems for trade unions. Threatening us with fines if we put a foot wrong and, fundamentally, trying to undermine the effectiveness of industrial action and our ability to protect our members.
That’s why we fought so hard – and, so far, so successfully – against the implementation of MSLs on the railway. When LNER said it intended to issue work notices to members, for the day we were due to strike, we immediately put on another five days of strikes – more industrial action, as we have promised, to ensure the same effect – which prompted the company to see sense and back down.
We did it not just for train drivers, but for every worker here in Britain. Because we don’t believe in forced labour. We believe in the right to strike. And that strikes are effective.
Earlier this year, the train operating companies reached out to us for ‘talks about talks’ to try to resolve our pay dispute. They would not have done that if we had not taken industrial action. Yes, that’s right. Strikes work.
Time to repeal anti-union legislation
The tectonic plates of British politics shifted on 4th July with the Labour landslide, and the opportunity to give hope, inspiration, and aspiration to millions cannot be underestimated. There is, of course, a massive task, with 14 million in poverty after 14 years of Tory economic incompetence.
We now need to make sure this Labour government will make work pay, grow the economy, and give ordinary people their voice back after the headlong rush to authoritarian autocracy.
We look forward to the railways being brought back into public ownership – a manifesto pledge which the new Labour Government is already intent on delivering – and we look forward to Keir delivering A New Deal for Working People (see p8). That means MSLs will be gone, ‘fire and rehire’ will be gone, zero-hours contracts will be gone, agency workers will be gone, political fund ballots will be gone, and workers will have employment rights from day one, and the right to organise that is so important in a democratic, civilised, and socialist society.
- Mick Whelan is General Secretary of ASLEF, the train drivers’ trade union, a member of the Labour Party NEC, and Chair of Labour Unions.
- This article was originally published in CLPD’s Campaign Briefing Newsletter. Read it in full here.
- You can also read Labour Outlook’s 2024 Autumn Conference bulletin here.
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