support the tube strikes!

by Joe Thorne

See here for a full list of RMT picket times and locations – go down and visit from 22:00 Monday night or Tuesday morning!

Many of us will have been defending the tube strikes that begin on Monday evening, and continue – amongst different groups of workers – until the end of Tuesday to friends and fellow workers.  Many will be grumpy about their journey being disrupted; susceptible to TFL and government propaganda; and – perhaps without admitting it – somewhat jealous of the leverage, organisation, and (at least what they imagine to be) the superior terms and conditions of RMT members.  RMT General Secretary Bob Crow may be a figure of particular annoyance.

tube strikers attacked for resisting the recession

Kieran Hunter looks at the public reaction to June’s 48-hour London Underground strike

‘England fans hit strikers for six’ declared a headline in The Sun referring to the fact that the inconvenience attendees suffered getting to Wembley due to the tube strike did little to impact upon attendance, or dampen enthusiasm about, England’s 6-0 victory over Andorra. Revelling in this, The Sun published pictures of England fans holding up signs declaring that Bob Crow, RMT general secretary and organiser of the tube strikes, ‘is a ******’ (1).

The public response to the two-day strike across London’s tube network in mid-June has largely been a reaction to their immediate experiences, rather than one of solidarity with the striking workers. In many ways, as one commentator has observed, the reaction was not particularly different to the reaction to the heavy snow that brought the London transport network to a halt earlier in the year (2).

tube strike: how did negotiations break down?

Many Londoners have been fuming about the extra hours its taken them to get into work and back home since RMT members on the tube went on strike at 7pm on Tuesday. Unfortunately, some have taken to blaming the RMT, understandable given the vicious propaganda carried out by Boris Johnson, Transport for London, and the likes of the Evening Standard. However, as socialists, we need to point out that the line we get spun by the bosses is rarely the whole truth (or even the truth at all).  For this reason, this video explanation by RMT General Secretary Bob Crow of what really happened in the negotiations – the truth about ‘the demand for a 5% raise’ and redundancies – is useful for us.  Crow invites the bosses to sue him for slander or libel if what he says is untrue.