THE TORIES are proposing to turn free and independent trade unions into ‘Labour Fronts’ run by the bosses with their new anti-trade union legislation.
Under the proposed law, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill, some trade union members will be ordered to continue working during a legal strike.
The legislation will allow bosses to name workers who will have to keep minimum services going during a trade union strike action to make sure the bosses win.
To meet minimum staffing levels – which are still to be announced – employers would be able to issue a ‘work notice’ stating the workforce they need.
Employees named on the work notice would lose their right to protection from unfair dismissal if they then went on strike. Under the legislation there would be no automatic protection from unfair dismissal for an employee who is told to work under minimum service agreements but chooses to strike.
Appearing before the House of Commons Transport Committee of MPs yesterday, RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said that the current dispute on the railways is being ‘completely directed by the government’ and that ‘they wanted these strikes to go ahead!’.
Lynch told the panel of MPs: ‘We will never sign up to accepting DOO (driver only operation). It will never happen while I’m general secretary and while the RMT exists.’
He revealed: ‘Nothing happens in this industry without the secretary of state and the 50 people in the DfT today that are working on this dispute in what they call “workforce support”, knowing about it – 50 people are working full time beside the politicians right now!’
Lynch went on to reveal that the question of DOO was deliberately introduced at the last minute late last month in order to ‘torpedo’ any possibility of a settlement.
He said: ‘Why, if you are seeking a resolution to a serious high profile industrial dispute, would you wait until Sunday afternoon at 4pm, to put nine clauses into a document which weren’t in the previous version. It’s daft. To me it’s sabotage. And they wanted these strikes to go ahead.’
He continued: ‘They brought forward stage managed releases in the last week about minimum service levels and about disruption and all the rest of it and about me and other people in the industry, all primed through certain press outlets. The whole thing has been completely stage managed, leading up to Monday’s sessions with the trade unions.’
Speaking about the new anti-union legislation that the Tories introduced in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Lynch told the committee: ‘It tickles me that they will put non-qualified people in signal boxes to break strikes, and they’ll have safety incidents which they have every time that there is a strike when managers break the rules and break their competency basis, but they claim that it’s the unions that are endangering safety.’
He continued: ‘Conscripting workers to go to work against their will is an outrage and that’s what this legislation will bring forward that either we will name them or the companies will name them, or even the Secretary of State may name individuals that have to go to work on strike days.’
Also appearing before the committee were Frank Ward, Interim General Secretary of the TSSA and Mick Whelan, General Secretary of Aslef, who said that there is ‘zero likelihood of a settlement’.
Aslef leader Whelan added: ‘We’re further away than we started.’ When asked by MPs how close a resolution was on a scale of one to 10, Whelan said: ‘I think you can include zero.’
Last Friday rail companies made their first offer to drivers, an 8% pay rise spread over two years. But Whelan said he could not recommend ‘any one element of it’, adding it could ‘destroy the ability to go back to talks.’
Frank Ward, interim general secretary of the TSSA, told the committee hearing he could not disagree with Whelan’s statement.
Lynch also said conditions attached to the offer from train companies – which included ticket office closures and the expansion of driver only trains, which the RMT says threatens the role of guards – involved ‘such profound changes that they’ll be very difficult for any union to accept’.
The issue is crystal clear. The British bosses are seeking to get out of their terminal economic and political crisis by a super exploitation of the working class.
These proposals must be dismissed with contempt, and the whole of the TUC mobilised for a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and a nationalised and planned socialist economy!
