On The Obvious Lure of Unions

I don't belong to a union, I never have and probably never will. I think this strike is pointless because the unions will not win. LU, rightly, will not back down, meaning that RMT/TSSA members will lose a day's pay for no reason and most Londoners and commuters will be severely inconvenienced.

A couple of things, however, have always annoyed me about comments to Annie Mole's blog. First of all, you get someone like centralboy on there who, while his opinions are a pole apart from mine, is clearly reasonable and not one of the RMT's unthinking, moronic stooges. Rather than debate with him in an adult way, people resort almost immediately to ad hominem arguments or simply a condescending tone. Staff like centralboy are clearly the type of people that managers in my grade and above should be trying to win around; treating him like a moron is ridiculous and doesn't make our jobs any easier.

Secondly, though I dislike the unions, you'd be a fool not to realise that the very reason LU staff enjoy a secure job with good pay and benefits is because of union action. People in other industries used to have unions, but gave them up. Now they wonder why they have lower pay than they deserve and have jobs which are at the whim of their senior managers.

Before I joined LU I was a manager in the construction industry. It frequently irritates me that I cannot simply fire some of the wasters that I meet in LU like I was able to in my old job - the exact kind of people who, as Stevem so rightly points out make all other LU staff look bad. That is a definite downside of the unions. Calling a strike over a plan which doesn't involve compulsory redundancies and which would simply be implemented with mere office griping in any other industry is another. I could name at least 20 more without thinking about it.

Remember these things though: not all union or even RMT members are like Bob Crowe; lots of staff are actually worried about safety, no matter how much of a smokescreen it may appear; many more staff think that this is probably the tip of the iceberg, and you don't get to keep your job and lifestyle the way it is by rolling over. Everyone else saying "that's not fair, we can't protect ourselves so why should you?" will not make these union members suddenly think "oh yes, how right you are". Having witnessed what has happened in other industries which no longer have union representation, it will probably just make them redouble their efforts.

One final thing: the staff working on the stations and trains tomorrow are clearly not strikers, yet from personal experience we always get some form of abuse from at least one cretinous individual. Please don't let it be you.