Gordon Brown’s problems increased yesterday with the news that rail workers are to take four days of strike action immediately after Easter in a bitter row over jobs and working practices, threatening the worst disruption for 16 years.
Thousands of members of the Rail Maritime and Transport union (RMT) and the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA) employed by Network Rail will take action from Tuesday April 6, sparing Easter holiday travellers.
The RMT said its 5,000 members working as signallers will strike between 6am and 10am and between 6pm and 10pm on April 6,7,8 and 9.
The union’s 12,000 NR maintenance workers, and TSSA’s 800 members working as supervisors, will stage an all-out strike from 6am on April 6 to 11.59pm on April 9.
Rail workers will also ban overtime and rest-day working for the duration of the strike.
Commenting on the announcement Liberal Democrat Shadow Transport Minister, Jenny Randerson said:
“This is disastrous news for the travelling public. I would urge the Unions and Network Rail to get back to ACAS as soon as possible to do anything they can to avert this strike.
“This action is likely to be ongoing as the election is called and therefore is likely to become a big issue.
“I think the Unions are likely to lose public sympathy by this action. Essentially they will be cancelling services for an entire working week and they have little hope of coming out of this favourably unless they win the support of the public. This is not the way to do that.”
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““This is disastrous news for the travelling public. ”
“I think the Unions are likely to lose public sympathy by this action.”
The Liberal Democrats are an anti-working class party. RMT are fighting to defend their terms and conditions. You don’t give a stuff about them and you try to divide them from “the travelling public”. It puts your stance over the PCS strike into practice. You didn’t really want Labour and Plaid to forego their wages, you just wanted to criticise the unions. After all, collective bargaining completely undermines the indivualist, every-man-for-himself, what’s in it for me approach which is behind liberal ideology.
How exactly is urging employers and employees to get back around the table anti-working class? Plaid Cymru are indulging more and more in gesture politics. Furthermore you have never understood Liberalism and you never will.
If Freedom Central chooses to simply put up media-derived cut and paste narrative on the effects of the strike, rather than provide any insightful comment on the underlying reasons behind the dispute, then it lays itself open to the kind of broad accusation that Welsh Ramblings takes such great delight in making.
The unions involved, and these are mostly supervisory staff, claim that proposed staffing changes by Network Rail will add further unecessary risk for the “travelling public” by reducing safety coverage at key locations and at peak travelling times. It would not have hurt to have added these points.
“How exactly is urging employers and employees to get back around the table anti-working class? Plaid Cymru are indulging more and more in gesture politics. Furthermore you have never understood Liberalism and you never will.”
Because you want to stop the workers using their bargaining tactic which is the right to take industrial action when negotiations are seen to have failed. You want endless talk at the table so that the threat of industrial action becomes worthless, so that employers are strengthened and the working class is weakened. That might not be your direct intention but that’s what it’ll lead to. You are a liberal, you presumably support free market economics like Nick Clegg, though I appreciate the Lib Dems are an amalgamation of two different political traditions and don’t know which side Peter Black comes from. In any case, this dispute has been ongoing for some time and going on strike is a final resort. They aren’t exactly rushing out just for the sake of it.
Surely you can see that it’s wrong and cynical to look out for “the travelling public” and not mention what the striking workers’ families must be going through at this difficult time? They’re fighting against the kind of corner-cutting that has contributed to rail deaths and injuries, not just of workers but of the same travelling public you believe you’re defending! I suppose there are more votes amongst the travelling public at large, all with their busy lives and needing to get from A to B as quickly as possible for the sake of efficiency. It’s essentially a centre-right liberal Blairite mantra that you’re following and all it’ll lead to is a deterioration of safety on the rail network and an undermining of pay and conditions.
Maybe I don’t understand liberalism but you clearly don’t understand trade unionism.
You are making a lot of assumptions about the Welsh Liberal Democrats’ position here that are not correct. We do recognise the right of workers to strike, we do not want to remove that right from them, all we have done is to urge both parties to continue talking. I do not recognise that as anti-working class or anti-union. Many Liberal Democrats are active Trade Unionists. I was when I worked in the civil service but that does not mean that I will blindly support any cause without question or dissent if I think that it deserves it.
Neither Nick Clegg nor the Liberal Democrats embrace free market economics in the way that you mean it. We recognise the importance of markets but we also acknowledge the need for state intervention. You will recall that it was Vince Cable who first called for the ‘nationalisiation’ of the banks in this current crisis.
We are not taking sides in this dispute but we do acknowledge that there are more than two. The interests of the travelling public and of the economy are important as well and need to be acknowledged. That does not make us Blairites, it makes us concerned citizens.
And as for all of this labelling, I am astonished that Plaid Cymru have been so quick to assume the anarcho-syndicalist mantle. It hardly fits with the image of a ‘party of government’ that you are trying to create.
Why is what Welsh Ramblings says indicative of what Plaid thinks. I am just one of many nationalist bloggers, some of whom are liberals and centrists rather than socialists. You do me too much credit. Though for what it’s worth, anarcho-synidcalism (not a position I hold or that WR as a blog supports) has a long history in Plaid and one of its founders was an anarcho-syndicalist IIRC. There is no need to create a ‘party of government’ image, Plaid is one, evidently. They have just retained their edge, which is a good thing.
On the topic, I accept that liberals are involved in trade unionism. I would argue that the Orange Book which Nick Clegg co-authored and some of which I have read cautions quite openly against state intervention and says state intervention should only happen in a crisis. That is my reading anyway. In this dispute clearly you have taken sides against the RMT because they have balloted for strike action and you are still opposing them. Arguing for more negotiations before balloting would have been an ok position to take. Yet you continue to do so after the democratic decision to take industrial action has been made by the workers. So quite clearly, by not supporting the strike now you are undermining them.
I don’t think any reasonable reading of this could indicate that we have taken sides against the RMT. It is simply not the case. By the way the Orange Book also comtains articles by Social Liberals. There are only two chapters in it that could be characterised as free marketeering.