…which is a good description of (the driver/signaller side of) the rail industry. Which is why the schemes to replace labour with capital in LU are so complex, expensive and long-term, and wouldn’t be happening at all if the union relations weren’t so toxic.

But Bob Crow is the natural and necessary response to:

“it’ll seek to produce the goods and services that can earn it the largest profit in the cheapest way possible”

As that immediately places the bosses in conflict with the workers. And it is all very well suggesting that some companies do emply ‘high road’ management practices, but the fact is they are not the norm. They are most suitable to highly skilled jobs that are resistant to routinisation or externalisation, where the labour market is a sellers’ market. But what for the rest? The majority are not in this position.

And anyhow, the ‘high road’ practices are influenced by the model of Japan in the early 1980s, a corporate state where, at the time, the company men got jobs for life, sports teams, extensive welfare, etc., i.e. Fordist welfarism within a mini-state corporation. That wasn’t the case in Britain, and no amount of subservience would have made it so.

No, it’ll seek to produce the goods and services that can earn it the largest profit in the cheapest way possible. That doesn’t have to involve mechanisation and de-skilling; it can often be more cost-effective to have a skilled and well-paid workforce. But that relies on a positive relationship between the company and its employees, which isn’t going to happen if the union’s led by a figure like Bob Crow.

I fail to see how this is a *result* of an antagonistic relationship. If a company is driven by the logic of capitalism it will seek to mechanise, either to de-skill or to de-man the labour process and increase the rate of exploitation. The same goes for employing cheaper workers, here or abroad. A strong union is the only defence against this logic, unless we are to rely on the benevolent, enlightened charity of the employers*, even if unions as they exist are not strong enough to win the fight in the long term.

The idea that these changes were the result of an antagonstic relationship appears to be of the kind that sees class war only when the working classes are sounding the charge, and not in the everday, attritional gains of the bosses.

*Which is effectively what you recommend that the low paid, in routinised, low skilled or de-skilled jobs must rely on.

Wrong on the RMT assertion. And I doubt a Tory blog would a) care overmuch about the cleaners or b) approve of the concept of a craft union in the first place.

“A lot of recent disputes have been about issues such as the filthy working conditions staff face with as well as attempts by London Underground to cut corners on safety etc.”

Hmm. If by “cut corners on safety” they mean “get rid of insane gold-plating”, then I’m all in favour. In general, I’m a believer that public transport in this country is too safe (ie it’d be better in benefit/cost analysis terms if we spent less on safety and more on capacity – the lives saved by the modal shift from much-more-dangerous cars would far outweigh the lives lost by a higher-but-still-low rate of train and bus accidents).

“If you look abroad for the best examples of public transport, they are never run under private finance (to my knowledge) ”

Hmm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_Corporation_Limited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMRT_Corporation

The Moscow underground is a memorial to all the people who died building it, and again it is on such a scale that it could be designed to prevent double-tracking of lines which is the main cause of stacking, and means Moscow underground doesn’t have or need to operate according to a timetable, nor does it need any central planning team to expand the service. The design strengths of the Moscow underground mean it is far cheaper and more flexible to run and can easily avoid pricing model changes well into the next century (the unlimited nature of ticket pricing is particularly liberal). It can’t be described as evidence in favour of central control, rather the opposite.

The Ukraine follows the soviet model while Italian railways benefit from the linear geography of the country, but is otherwise mainly similar to the German system.

The peculiarity of continental railways is the way tolerance for delays is included into timetables by allowing for connections, and although waiting at stations or signals for alloted slots is often confusing to the British experience of inflexibility this is a result of the isolated development of our networks – the multilateral integration of so many nations rail connections is a perfect example of how centralisation doesn’t work.

The collapse of British rail freight gave the passenger network breathing space for a couple of decades and obscured many of the system flaws, but since the channel tunnel opened freight has become far more relevant again.

The inflexibility of central planning means it is unable to predict changes and therefore failure is designed into the system.

I was not advocating a communist regime at all. Just aspects of it, namely central planning and management for the transport infrastructure.

@ Neil

I give more than one word; Germany, France, Italy, Russia….

@thomas

Again, Russia, Ukraine, etc…they all have very effective and very planned rail road systems. Take Moscow’s metro as an example. I really don’t understand this almost blind disagreement with central planning, it’s as stupid as blind disagreement with competition.

“much of the misplaced criticism of the RMT on this thread seems to assume that the RMT is a craft union”

Again, don’t get me wrong – anything which ensures that unskilled London workers are paid the living wage is brilliant.

Nonetheless, the reason the RMT is perceived as a craft union is that it mostly is – its core function is to preserve the role of train guards and drivers as people who earn well above the median wage for doing a skilled working class job. ASLEF is more of a craft union, I admit, but if you don’t think RMT’s core representation and leadership is drawn from the skilled grades rather than the poor, then I’ve got a bridge for sale.

“John B(38) 4.9% is a crap pay rise when the RPI is 5%.”

Aye, and real GDP growth is 0%. Yes, that sucks; I don’t quite understand why driving a train or operating a signalbox is supposed to exempt you from the general fucked-ness of everything.

To other commentators; thomas (37) thankyou for describing a comment on a blog post as a critique of classical liberalism but the RMT are uniting not dividing the workers (as you would expect from an industrial union – indeed much of the misplaced criticism of the RMT on this thread seems to assume that the RMT is a craft union, which is, to put it kindly, misinformed).

John B(38) 4.9% is a crap pay rise when the RPI is 5%. Just because we are all getting crap pay rises doesn’t change the fact that our standard of living is falling (yet there is still growth in labour productivity across the economy so someone somewhere is reaping the benefit…) and as for the steel industry, how many workers are there producing that steel? The rise and fall of industries and sectors depends on far more than trade union strategies, which have a fairly minor influence.

The point that the original post makes about the limits to the benefits to be obtained by sectional militancy is sound, but the conclusion that sectional militancy should be abandoned for moderation is flawed. From a trade union perspective the answer is surely that we should build unity and solidarity amongst workers – and that we need a political voice for organised labour (indeed to make a balanced judgement of Bob Crow’s leadership of the RMT it would also be appropriate to take into account the RMT’s support for the Shop Stewards Network).

But that is probably a whole series of other posts…

I’ll put you in contact.

I hope to. If you can point me in the right direction I’d like that. Rest assured I’m pro-union. I just thought the article would provoke a good discussion that shouldn’t be shied away from.

It is selective in the extreme to say that authoritarian states have good public transport, as if that justifies voting for Mussolini – only he could make the trains run on time, dontcha know!

Anyhoo, I’m not sure I know which former communist states you’re refering to, or if any of them were actually what they claimed.

You seem to argue against your earlier case for nationalisation in saying you are angered that costs have increased while service has dropped. So which is it?

I agree competition is the means by which better service can be wrought under our current democratic political system, and I disagree that inadequate and oversufficient regulation has enabled this country to enjoy the benefits of it: strategic decision making has been disincentivised precisely because regulators have been biased against competition.

So really it is the lack of competition which has proved counter-productive in your sense, while I claim that the minimal level of competition has produced only minimal improvements.

Our disagreement over the prescription for the problem arises from our disagreement over the diagnosis, not any political disagreement.

Yes, it tells that if you enslave an entire population and shoot a few disobedient slaves now and then, you can indeed achieve at least a proportion of centrally planned objectives (not all, Slovakia’s railways are rubbish!). Perhaps we could use the pyramid building strategies of the Egyptian pharaohs to prepare for the 2012 Olympics – wouldn’t have so many cost overruns then and those stadium WOULD be up on time!

I think you need to stop looking at things from a purely economical point of view. It’s very liberating.

I want to reduce the competition in this case further because I don’t see it as the ends. I see it as means that should be applied when it proves useful. In case of public rail transport it has proved massively counter productive. It has made strategic decision making harder, it has made for a dismembered system that nobody knows who is responsible for what, it has made for massive increases of ticket fairs and government subsidies with no apparent improve in punctuality and services.

It fascinating how the former communist states all have very effective public transport networks. Don’t you think that tells us something?

Oh, and Bob Crow doesn’t tell any of us to go on strike. Workers – RMT members – vote for strikes, and we often get cross with our national leadership for not calling strikes soon or often enough, or calling them off too soon.

I’m surprised, but pleased, that the cleaners have succeeded in their action. I’m sceptical that it’s that directly connected to the strike campaign, though – the disruption caused by the cleaner strikes earlier this year was negligible, and there’s a general move among London public sector organisations to force contractors to pay the living wage.

All well and good, but what we *should* have is a regional variation in the minimum wage, with London employers *forced* to pay £7.50 per hour (rather than cleaners who happen to clean high-profile semi-public sector bits getting a decent deal, while dishwashers in restaurants and cleaners in factories continue to get £2 less for working in worse conditions).

In terms of the people whose strikes make a serious difference – the drivers and signallers – they earn more than most of the workers they’re transporting, and 4.9% isn’t a bad pay rise to be taking home this year. Of course they have the right to band together to protect their conditions, and the withdrawal of their skilled labour is a serious threat. My point is purely that their current tactics might not be the best strategic move to defend their position…

“The moderate leadership of the ISTC was no better at defending the steel industry than the militant leadership of the NUM were at defending the coal industry.”

Err… we still make 14 million tonnes of steel a year, which is about the same as in 1978. How much coal do we make?

I’m sorry, but I don’t see that any of the questions relating to nationalisation have been answered.

Rail isn’t a ‘natural monopoly’ because it competes with other methods of transport and anyway there is scope for choice over routes, timetables and formats. Local trains, inter-city trains and high-speed trains haven’t entered into competition against each other here doesn’t disprove the fact that they can, if we look to other countries for example. Cross-ownership is also anti-competitive.

Soon @25
How would the transfer of ownership be paid for? It isn’t being paid for now because it isn’t happening at the moment.

How would it pay for itself? If fares and subsidies are to continue at the same rate how does the government secure preferential borrowing rates on the market value of company equity to continue current levels of investment without negatively influencing inflationary levels or currency exchange rates? With no increase in capacity there is no chance of reducing fares without increasing taxation or introducing artificial measures to control competition from other transport formats.

I think you need to learn a bit about capital finance to understand why shareholding is necessary to provide adequate guarantees by voluntarily underwriting project costs and rather than by the coercive central government/taxation method. Part of this government’s economic malaise is to do with the way it has overextended itself in accruing risk and burdening the taxpayer at the expense of the general well-being.

I agree that we have a system of non-competition currently, so I find it odd that you wish to reduce it further.

Aaron@28
I think it’s not the private sector which has made a mess, but that they have done the best they could under the given situation. It was the government which messed up by ensuring companies couldn’t do their jobs properly enough through failed regulation and the ongoing failure of the regulators.

Sunny@29
Spoken like a true Londoner! Londoners contribute a larger proportion of the national income by paying proportionately less of their personal income in taxation.

Public transport can only be argued to provide a net benefit to those with less means because of the gross distortions in the market regulations and their resulting conditions of operation which support that conclusion.

If parking in London were more available this cost imbalance would be reduced – in fact where the costs differentials are marginal the fact that the roads are clogged show that people prefer to take advantage of the flexibility of choices available to them and are willing to accept congestion by creating it in the first place.

Furthermore public transport only eases congestion or provides any economic or environmental benefit where it is used efficiently. Multiple empty busses do more harm than good, while the land space taken by shelters, stops and rail or other infrastructure reduces the total environment available while damaging the natural landscape (some would say that London is already so blighted that any change is an improvement).

Public transport is potentially justifiable, but only in relation to the alternatives and by contrast with unregulated spawl.

-

Getting back to the issue of strikes. It is the centralised nature of the current underground organisational structure which makes it so vulnerable to militancy, while this also creates disempowerment for the diffent types of workers thereby leading to divergent quality of conditions.

The RMT and Bob Crow is playing off sympathy for those at the bottom of the scale (cleaners etc) in order to advance the interests of those at the top (drivers, engineers, etc), because the powers that be within the union know that any change in the fundamental structure would harm their ability to make further profits from militant action at the expense of those below them – If the drivers cared about the cleaners they would offer to split any monetary considerations with them and if the RMT cared about the general conditions of the tube they’d be encouraging greater equality between the different types of worker.

Laurie, I’m sorry to say, is caught in the divide between attempting to profit from inequality by building political capital off the backs of those who suffer and actually seeking more equality.

Jon Rogers, that is hilarious – you defend your critique of classical liberalism and comparative methodology by making a comparison between underground workers and the government attitude to city bonuses!!

The RMT is growing because it opposes effective partnership and is growing it’s power by effectively dividing the workers among themselves.

I invite you to think through the alternative approach implied by your criticisms. The RMT should be less enthusiastic to increase their members’ pay? They should advocate restraint to the tube drivers in precisely the same way Government Ministers do not to recipients of city bonuses?

If they could command the majority support of their members for this self-denying approach, so that the employers saved some money, what would the employers do with the money? Do you think that this would lengthen the life of their industry? Should this be of concern to the workers in the industry?

If trade union strategy and politics were the decisive determinant of sectoral change in the economy you might have a point, but there is no evidence to support the underlying assumptions of your argument. The moderate leadership of the ISTC was no better at defending the steel industry than the militant leadership of the NUM were at defending the coal industry.

Once again, you’re looking at the short term. What use is having a strong leadership when there is no-one to lead after the management do everything they can to eradicate their problem of a distemperate service and (as they will see it) being held to ransom. And the more this happens the less support the workers will get, I’ve not problem with the RMT getting their workers up to what should be minimum standards in working conditions and pay, but certainly with tube drivers we’re well beyond that point.

When the high streets are claiming millions of pounds in losses every time a strike hits and worries of losing long term business over unreliability of service you know that there will be pressures from different sectors on tube management to sort this problem from happening…and you know the solution won’t be a 10% pay rise and 10 more day’s holiday a year.

I’ve just published on my blog the success of the RMT Cleaners dispute (www.unionfutures.blogspot.com) where under Bob Crows leadership low paid (mainly black women) migrant workers will finally get a london living wage.

The RMT are the fastest growing union because of their leaderships strength to stand up for the workers – when most other unions growth is at a standstill at best.

There have been a number of strikes on the underground recently and I can understand how some commuters get frustrated by that – but are we to stop sticking up for vulnerable workers rights because some city types get frustrated? Don’t think so!

Bob Crow is there to stick up for his workers – the new labour hangers on in the TU movement despise him because he has the balls to stand up to them – the employers despise him because he has the support of the workforce and he scares the shit out of them.

Its an easy decision to make are we for someone who sticks up for the workers or against them – Anyone who claims to be a left or liberal can surely see whose side they should be on.