It is nearly a year now since the latest round of rail strikes began. They have cost union members thousands of pounds in lost income. But according to Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, on the Today programme this morning the union has made ‘zero progress’ in its negotiations with the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies.
This was the point, eleven months in, at which Arthur Scargill finally gave up and sent his members back to work ‘with their heads held high’. But not Whelan, apparently. He indicated that he is digging in for the even longer haul, contemplating another year’s worth of strikes.
The trouble for the rail unions is that the country doesn’t need their services nearly so much as they reckoned
When you have spent a whole year trying to achieve something and still made no progress, is it really sensible to carry on? The trouble for the rail unions, and this is something they don’t appear to have worked out for themselves yet, is that the country doesn’t need their services nearly so much as they reckoned.
There was a time when the train drivers held as much power as the miners: they could turn the lights out by ceasing to operate the ‘merry-go-round’ trains which carried coal from the pits to the power stations. Those days are well and truly over, with coal falling away to an insignificant proportion of electricity generation.
Nor is the country nearly so reliant on commuting as it once was. Even though many companies are gradually ordering their employees back to their desks – part-time at least – the infrastructure is now there to allow office workers to switch back to working from home on strike days.
The rail unions have tried to switch instead towards targeting leisure travel, choosing Saturdays as strike days, and targeting particular sporting and cultural events. Their efforts to claim that it was merely coincidental that they held a strike on the day of the Eurovision Song Contest and will be holding one for the FA Cup Final do not convince anyone.
While annoying, these do not cause mass disruption, especially given the rail industry’s failure to rise to the occasion and put on extra trains for events like the FA Cup (one year it even scheduled engineering works for the FA Cup weekend). Most Mancunians with tickets for Wembley will have made other travel arrangements anyway.
Moreover, we still have the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill passing through parliament. Once that becomes law, the ability of public sector unions to cause chaos will be much diminished. What we are seeing on the railways, in hospitals and elsewhere at the moment may prove to be one last hurrah for the trade union movement.
Figures revealed by the Department for Business and Trade this week show that trade union membership among the young is collapsing – with just 4 per cent of 16-24 year olds members of a union compared with 40 per cent of the over 50s. Recent waves of strikes have resembled a 1970s tribute act, carried out by relatively old, highly-paid workers in public sector occupations.
The decline of trade unionism among the young is paradoxical given that in many other ways young people seem to be drifting leftwards. There seems to be no shortage of young climate activists offering themselves as fodder – but Just Stop Oil’s gain is trade unionism’s loss.
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