They have no more rights than rest of us

They are people who in their working lives were employed by companies which went bust. Though they as employees had paid their share of the pension contributions, their employer had not met its share. The result was that there was not enough accumulated money to pay them the pensions they thought they had earned and paid for.

Compared with them, the employees of Metronet are decidedly well-off. They have received assurances that the pensions they have accumulated so far are safe - guarantees given first by former deputy prime minister John Prescott when Metronet was set up and took over work which had been done directly by the Tube authority as an employer.

They have also received more guarantees now that Metronet has gone bust, from the administrator running the company, that the rules will not change during the period that he is in charge, and again that their pensions will be safe. On top of that, if all else fails, there is now the Pension Protection Scheme to provide a safety net in just such cases. But Metronet employees have still been called out on strike for three days this week and next by the RMT.

And in spite of the rhetoric this is not because of worries about the pensions these employees have earned so far. It is because their union is demanding guarantees that nothing will ever change in the future. That, as most people will realise, is an impossible guarantee for anyone to give. Who knows who, if anyone, will buy the rump of Metronet - or what it is worth - but if preserving pensions and jobs for ever was one of the conditions of sale the company's value would plummet and it might never find a buyer in which case the employees will all be out of work.

Remember too that whatever deal is struck, it will be the travelling public who pick up the tab in higher fares, as there is no other source of money.

The situation is of course clouded, and deliberately so, by the PPP contract - the handing over of maintenance to the private sector - and the union has cleverly played on distrust of this deal and its subsequent failure. In fact it is completely irrelevant.

The PPP principle is not inherently flawed; witness the fact that the parallel PPP with Tube Lines, which is responsible for the Northern, Piccadilly and Jubilee lines, continues to work well. Metronet failed not because it was a PPP deal but because its management was incompetent - for the same reason, in fact, that most companies fail. And the union is misleading its members in making them think they have any more right to future guarantees of their income and job security than anyone else who has worked for a company which went bust. It's brutal, but it's capitalism.