What is Boris Johnson's Tube unions strategy?
Yesterday London Underground announced that it is going ahead from Sunday with its reductions in ticket office opening hours despite ongoing talks at ACAS with the RMT and TSSA about safety issues. The latter accused Boris of "jumping the gun." The Mayor, as chair of the Transport for London board, is LU's ultimate boss. Is the decision to go ahead a challenge to those unions? Has Boris calculated that he would gain politically from proceeding despite their displeasure, even if further strike action results?
The latter, I suspect, is highly unlikely while the ACAS talks continue, though the longer-term picture is less clear. And there have been clues that Boris believes he can profit from at least looking as though he has been taking a more forceful approach. There was his duet with Dave in The Sun making the highly questionable claim that "a few union leaders" were planning strikes on royal wedding day. There's his calling for a change in the law so that fifty percent of a union's membership must cast a vote in any strike ballot for its outcomes to be legitimate - a change which, if applied to politicians would deprive some inner city constituencies of their MPs, Wales of its Assembly and, yes, London of its Mayor.
Also, there was his speech at the London Government Dinner, the one that was spun by Tory media to suggest he plans to "break" the unions by introducing so-called "driverless trains." Boris didn't actually use any of those words and! those h e did use didn't stand much scrutiny, as Christian Wolmar showed. Even if every train on the system were staffed by people who aren't "drivers" in the sense that most people understand it they'd probably want to be in unions. Would Londoners want trains that are not staffed at all? Where would the cash needed to enable comprehensive automation come from? How many decades would pass before the the technology was installed?
That said, the message from the hyperbolic reporting of Boris's speech was one that some Londoners - not to mention the Conservative grassroots across Britain, an audience Boris is always keen to please as he dreams of Number 10 - will want to hear. And if the Mayor gets away with making those ticket office changes in spite of whatever the unions say or do, he'll surely claim vindication of his view that last year's strikes were "pointless" and that he's made practical savings without breaking the letter of his manifesto pledge of "halting the proposed Tube ticket office closures [of Ken Livingstone], and ensuring there is always a manned ticket office at every station." (page two)
The unions will see it differently. They'll want to emerge from the ACAS safety review saying they have saved at least some of the 800 jobs LU wants to shed - maybe 50 of them. TfL says "around 600" have already gone so far - 150 management post and 450 station posts, including 100 through voluntary redundancy - and that although they will "continue to work through any specific local issues...to date no specific safety issues that we need to address have been raised." If they are, say TfL, these can be addressed perfectly well after the new ticket office hours are introduced almost totally unchanged ! from whe n they published their proposals last March.
I wrote a while back that an untidy compromise will eventually be reached, which both sides will call a victory. Perhaps I should adjust that to a non-compromise, which both call a win. Whatever happens next it won't be peace. A war of words continues with the RMT, which is claiming that the new arrangements will leave many stations effectively unstaffed due to lack of cover during meal breaks. TfL "totally refutes" this, saying that the situation under the new opening hours will be no different from before.
Whatever the eventual reality, the experiences of passengers will play a part in the progress of this struggle. If they report, even mistakenly, that stations are unstaffed or start complaining about minimal ticket office opening times it could create a political problem for Boris - one that Ken Livingstone will be keen to exploit, notwithstanding that his own plans for ticket offices and redeploying station staff were in some ways more radical than Boris's).
It's amusing that Boris has damned the Tube strikes for being "political" when he's been playing politics throughout: he must know perfectly well that the royal wedding strike "threat" never existed, but was happy to accept an invitation to condemn it from a Tory AM at Mayor's Question Time only last week. His surprise overture to Aslef's general secretary Keith Norman - reported by the BBC's Tom Edwards - was turned down partly out of suspicion that Boris was trying to drive a wedge between the diffe! rent Tub e unions, hoping he could peel off Aslef and reward them for being more "moderate" despite the stoppage on Boxing Day.
Meanwhile, depicting Livingstone as being in the pockets of the Tube unions continues to be a popular theme among online Ken-haters conducting Boris's pre-2012 electioneering on his behalf. They never mention that although Livingstone's campaign to become Labour's mayoral candidate was backed by Aslef and the TSSA he received no support at all from the RMT, with which he fell out badly when he was Mayor - none of them regard him a soft touch as a boss. They never mention either that Boris has made not the slightest attempt to honour his fanciful manifesto pledge to seek a no-strike agreement or that the number of strikes on the Underground in Boris's less than three years as Mayor is drawing level with the total during Livingstone's eight.
Love the Tube unions or loathe them, they're not going away and the fact is that Livingstone respects them more and would get more respect from them than Boris does in return. There would probably be fewer strikes under a Livingstone mayoralty as a result.
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