A-Infos (en) Britain, anarchosyndicalist Solidarity Federation Catalyst #22 Winter 2009 - page 2-3

Troubled tracks as pay claim looms for the underground ---- The triple dispute on London 
Underground (LUL) over redundancies, pay and victimisations appears at first sight to have 
fizzled out after the initial 48 hour strike back in June. ---- The redundancy issue was 
resolved for the time being by a compromise where management have not conceded the 
principle of no compulsory redundancies but no RMT member will be made redundant, for now.
The deadline for unions to accept or reject the pay offer has been extended until the 
beginning of October, as ASLEF, Unite! and TSSA have asked for more time to consider it. 
Activists from these unions have admitted that they had been waiting for the RMT to “punch
itself out” fighting Transport for London (TfL) management on its own, intending to come 
in, win the dispute and poach members from it at the last minute.

RMT activists are now biding
their time and seeking to get the
other unions involved in any future
pay dispute.
The single 48 hour strike
followed by a long wait for further
industrial action jarred with
RMT’s reputation as Britain’s most
militant union.
The lack of sustained strike
action compared unfavourably with
the postal strikes in London which
have occurred weekly for months
and even the successful united
action RMT took with ASLEF on
mainline services from London’s
Liverpool Street station.
The cynicism of the other unions
combined with doubts about the

commitment of RMT officials
and some activists to winning
the disputes to make much of
the membership reluctant to lose
pay for strikes which might prove
fruitless.
Much of the RMT’s reputation for
militancy at LUL stems from the
engineering workers employed on
what was the Metronet contract.
Not only did they square up to an
unscrupulous private consortium
for years but the work involved
fighting privatisation meant that
the officials had to leave the work
to lay activists, ceding control to
them in the process.
RMT activists directly employed
by LUL and TfL by contrast have
had a cosier relationship with
management and their stomach
for a fight is questionable.
The ex-Metronet workers brought
their rank-and-file organising
model, based on a standing strike
committee, into LUL with them.
The strike committee was
subject to sniping from established
LUL activists, and Bob Crow and
Pat Sikorsky took control of the
dispute.
The latter pair, who had
previously victimised LUL
Regional Officer Bobby Law also
sidelined his successor in the role,
Steve Headley.
und
The union’s leadership had
shown indecent haste in agreeing
the terms for transferring Metronet
workers to LUL without their reps’
agreement and are suspected of
not wanting a fight over pay and
redundancies.
==========================
The union’s
leadership had
shown indecent
haste in agreeing
the terms for
transferring
Metronet workers
to LUL without
their reps’
agreement
==========================
Nevertheless, what was originally
billed as London Mayor Boris
Johnson’s attempt to break the
RMT on LUL has failed.

----------------------------------------------

Contract cleaners fight poverty pay

Workers in contract cleaning face low
wages, a lack of basic employment
rights, bullying management and
victimisation for union activities.
However, especially among Latin
Americans, self-organisation has
sustained struggles against their
unscrupulous
multi-national
employers, and the fight against
the immigration controls which
are used to sack unwanted workers
and victimise union activists.
Contractors use immigration
controls to sack unwanted workers
and to punish them for organising.
A favourite tactic is to organise
an immigration raid under the
pretext of “health and
safety” training, where
ct cleanworkers are detained by riot police
and immigration officials and
subject to fast track deportation if
they can’t prove the right to work
in the UK. Another is to claim that
National Insurance numbers under
which NI has been paid by workers
for years are “suspicious” and to call
workers in for immigration checks,
knowing that anyone whose status
is questionable will disappear –
redundancy without the costs.
Grassroots struggles highlight
the inadequacy of the “organising
model” of trades unionism
favoured by the social democratic
unions who believe that capitalism
can and should be managed
better to benefit workers. To
do this they have to work with the
bosses, and get the Labour Party
to provide a legislative framework
to force the former to do so. A
top-down model of large, passive
unionised workforces, negotiation
controlled by full-time officials
and a concentration on “headline”
issues such as the London Living
Wage rather than the full range
of workers’ concerns is their
objective.
Social democrats see the fact
that these cleaning contractors
are rich multinational companies
as meaning they should be more
willing to pay better wages to their
workers as they can “afford” it. In
fact, they are rich precisely because

they are constantly cutting costs
on their existing contracts and
winning more contracts through
undercutting their competitors.
As well as giving their investors a
greater return this attracts further
investment and keeps the share
price up. Their wealth proves
they are ruthless, but makes them
attractive “partners” for the social
democrats.
Consequently, the
Justice4Cleaners campaign
organised by T&G/Unite! has
concentrated on “easy targets” and
neglected small groups of workers
in “hard to organise” workplaces.
Cleaners sacked by Amey at the
National Physical Laboratory
(NPL) in Teddington outside
London, working for Lancaster at
Schroders bank and for Mitie at
Willis insurance company in the
City of London have organised
themselves, and showed up the
unions and why they find such
workers “hard to organise”.
These campaigns have been
sustained by support from the Latin
American Workers Association,
No Borders and the Campaign
Against Immigration Controls.
Other supporters have included
SF members from the two London
Locals. Noise pickets have been
organised at contractors’ offices,
and outside events organised
or attended by their clients, to
embarrass them into taking
responsibility for the contractors’
actions.
Our aim should not just be to
shame capitalists into acting against
their own interests, but to expose
their true nature and to advocate
their abolition. The existing unions
cannot and will not do this; it is not
just the methods but the aims and
objectives of the social democrats
which fail the working class.

--------------------------------------------------------

Rise of school occupations

To the dismay of head-teachers everywhere,
this year has seen a marked rise in parent
militancy in response to closures and
handovers to private companies.
The agenda of handing community schools
to private interests means less accountability,
selection procedures, job insecurity, and a
focus on grades to the detriment of education
and care. Facing closures, academies and
foundation schools, people up and down the
UK have resisted with grass-roots campaigns
and, in several cases, occupation.
The first occupations occurred in Glasgow
where twenty-two schools are threatened
with closure, as part of a council plan to
plug a £6 million overspend. Wyndford, St
Gregory’s, Our Lady of the Assumption and
Victoria primary were occupied in April and
Wyndford was subsequently reoccupied in
June. Soon after, Lewisham Bridge primary
school in London was occupied by parents
after the council voted to demolish the site
and hand the school over to the medieval
Leathersellers livery company as an academy
school.
In early May parents at Charlotte Turner,
a primary in Greenwich, took the building
to fight a planned closure. In all cases
there had been a ‘consultation’ resulting in
overwhelming majorities opposed to the
changes and in all cases these were ignored.
With official lines of negotiation an obvious
sham, direct action became the only weapon
left to the parents.
Of the occupations, only Lewisham
Bridge has achieved some of its goals; the
children will be returning to the school
in November, the building remains and it
is still not an academy school. Although
this was nominally achieved by an English
Heritage listing, the force of the campaign
and the media attention it got undoubtedly
played a big part. Even without victories
(Wyndford and Charlotte Turner have been
closed), the occupations have brought self-
confidence to participants and bolstered
campaigns frustrated by officialdom. There
is a new willingness to take action for our
schools and every occupation is an example
to the next.
With coming cuts in education and the
onwards march towards privatisation, we
should expect more campaigns and more
occupations. Both main parties plan to attack
education after the next election. Labour’s Ed
Balls’ claims of savings in education can only
be achieved by merging schools and making
them ever bigger. The Tories intend to take
more schools out of local authority control
and into unaccountable companies.
With a pay freeze on the way, education
workers will be involved in their own
struggles. If the school campaigners and
workers can act together we could see more
victories in this academic year.
The workers will be able to draw
confidence from the support of parents, so
long as parents are actually able to speak to
staff, something that the unions have tried
to block in some cases. However, the student
occupation at SOAS in support of detained
and deported cleaners demonstrated the
solidarity links that can be made, as did the
vociferous student support at Tower Hamlets
College (see pages 4-5).

-------------------------------------------------

Prescription heroin‘cuts crime’

When it comes to drugs, the state’s policy
has traditionally been hard-line; blanket
prohibition and the criminalisation of users.
However a recent government-backed
study has cast doubt on the wisdom of this
approach, by showing that prescribing
heroin to addicts both drastically cut the use
of street drugs and markedly reduced crime.
Drug-related crime is a major problem
in working class communities, with former
colliery areas in south Wales and the north
of England having some of the highest rates
of heroin addiction. Research suggests that
between half and two thirds of all crime is
drug related. The Randomised Injecting
Opioid Treatment Trial (RIOTT) reported
over a two-thirds reduction in crimes
committed by the participants.
Professor Strang, who led the RIOTT
programme, said that the aim of the trial was
to determine whether prescribing heroin or
similar substitutes could help turn addicts’
lives around and prevent the cycle of crime
and imprisonment. “The surprising finding
– which is good for the individuals and good
for society as well – is that you can,” he said.
Will the evidence influence policy? Or
will the upcoming election see another
futile contest between politicians to appear
the most hard-line on those already at the
bottom of capitalist society? While the
government has indicated it will “roll out” a
supervised prescription program, concerns
have already been raised about the £15,000
per person annual cost. However, compared
to the £25,000 per person annual cost of
imprisonment that seems like a bargain
– even in the crude cost-benefit terms of
government ministers. That’s before even
taking into account the broader social costs
of widespread heroin addiction.

_________________________________________
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