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Bob Crow is an easy scapegoat for London's transport woes but weak management has played a major part...
The rail union leader Bob Crow, who staged a virtual shutdown of the Tube last week, is good at his job. His members support him and he makes them rich. His RMT Tube drivers get £40,000 a year basic, with kindly hours and generous holidays. He suffers no recession and his industry's paymaster, Transport for London, is financed by loads of public money.
Crow has calculated - and the evidence is with him - that it is worth occasionally hitting the Mayor, passengers and even his members with a brief strike once a year, just to remind the world that he exists. True, Ken Livingstone had the measure of him, nearly busting two of his strikes and holding him to two and three-year pay deals. But to Crow, strikes cause Londoners no more hardship than a couple of days of snow or the ongoing anarchies of hole diggers and traffic engineers, those persecutors of the London public. Crow deserves his status as a hero of organised labour.
Yet while a Tube strike may be a nostalgic throwback to the head-banging Seventies, it is also a massive inconvenience. While richer Londoners can ride it out, many poor people suffer from loss of work. It is hard to believe that Crow's members cannot be made rich and happy without this blunt tool. It is also hard to believe that managers still resort, as did Transport for London last week, to that archaic excuse, that the workers are "holding a gun to our heads" and doing themselves no good.
If Thatcherism taught anything it was that strikes are caused by weak management not by strong unions. It also taught paradoxically that privatisation was sometimes the cause rather than the cure of weak management, London's Underground being a classic instance. The chaotic Circle line would not be tolerated for a minute on the Paris Métro, where it would run immaculately to time and its infrastructure would be in the public sector.
Whereas London's response to bad industrial relations is for the Mayor to ask the Government to outlaw Tube strikes, as if they were a matter of national security, France's response is to build driverless trains. This week a plan was announced for Paris's Line 1, including the famous Louvre station, to be engineered to run without drivers. That is the way to handle Crow's members if London seriously wants to rid itself of strikes: render drivers obsolete, as on the Dockland Light Railway. The Victoria line was designed as driverless in 1967 but the management capitulated to the unions and kept them on.
Crow's greatest leverage has been the collapse in costly failure of Tube privatisation, created in 2003 by that most inept government department, the Treasury. Ever since, Crow and a dozen private contractors and consultancies have buzzed lucratively around the Treasury honeypot, walking away with hundreds of millions a year to absolutely no public benefit.
The Tube's infrastructure managers spend their waking hours trying to generate money from contracts rather than from better services. In this they are also handicapped by health-and-safety regulations unleashed on Tube maintenance, which have been a gift to the RMT. Any disciplinary offence, such as the two that contributed to last week's strike, can be redefined as a health-and-safety one.
I am told it now takes each night-time worker an hour before starting and finishing work just to tick boxes and check equipment.
The attention of Transport for London managers (who run the trains) is likewise diverted from service reliability to struggling with contracts and thinking like lawyers. I imagine they must also spend time counting their earnings. TfL boss Peter Hendy can hardly go in to negotiate a meagre one per cent pay rise with his workers when he and his senior colleagues are claiming City-style bonuses of £50,000-£130,000 on top of quarter-million pound salaries, irrespective of the rotten performance they deliver the London public.
Livingstone and Johnson as mayors should never have allowed such payments. Hendy is now giving 123 of his own staff more than £100,000 a year. Such fat-cat salaries for running a railway not appreciably better than it was 20 years ago defy justification and can only inflame industrial relations and enrage passengers. But when Network Rail can pay its boss £1.24 million, Britain is clearly heading Italy's way, where nobody is ever poor working white-collar for the state. If there is any group whom Labour has made rich it is public sector executives.
The Tube is now in a desperate financial mess. Privatisation has led to soaring costs and plummeting financial viability, including the pseudo-bankruptcy two years ago of the company in charge of two-thirds of the lines, Metronet. This failure cost the state £1.7 billion in bailing out debt alone. The shortfall on capital works and repairs, which privatisation (insisted on by Gordon Brown) was meant to solve, has rocketed to a further £5 billion.
The result is the future of the Tube lies not with a railway executive nor with an elected minister or mayor but with the so-called public-private partnership arbiter, Chris Bolt. He must decide what happens to much of a massive seven-year £40 billion subsidy to the Tube, which purportedly includes the ever more reckless Crossrail project.
If I were a non-metropolitan taxpayer I would ask what London has done to deserve such largesse. Brown, the ultimate anti-London politician, has ironically ended up pouring unprecedented sums into the capital to make up for the mess he made of its infrastructure.
There is no point in the Mayor, Boris Johnson, insulting his Tube unions as "demented" and "piss-taking", let alone in dreaming up legally enforceable no-strike deals. There is more point in boosting the pay of the other Tube drivers' union, Aslef, as a rival to Crow's RMT during strikes. Imagine what these guys will do before the Olympics. Either way, Johnson is right to delegate rather than appear to undermine the authority of his transport managers.
The courage Johnson needs to show is in killing the extravagant Crossrail project, releasing its land bank and giving himself financial room to manoeuvre on Tube infrastructure. He should fight the health-and-safety czars who are such friends to the unions and win for his managers proper control of staffing and operations, largely surrendered in the past to the union. Until then, Londoners will have to sit back and experience that echo of the punk Seventies called a Tube strike.
Reader views (6)
No, Bob Crow is a dinosaur who doesn't care how much damage he inflicts on Britain. We need to do whatever it takes to get rid of him. Of course there are problems with the way LU is run, and things are particularly hard during the recession. But none of the crippling strikes of the past few years have been remotely proportional.
And, Simon Jenkins, your only argument against Crossrail seems to be "it's expensive". Of course it is - but the lack of it would be more so. London desperately needs to put itself ahead of competing cities around the world, and cancelling crossrail would be a kick in the proverbials.
- Simon, Stratford, London
The response by Richard Parry, Managing Director, London Underground to this article clearly shows an attitude which I could never imagine coming from Tim O'Toole. Who knew that a good working relationship with his workers provided long term benefits when it came to industrial relations.
It is beginning to look like the departure of Tim O'Toole from TFL was as engineered by Boris as the departure of Sir Ian Blair from the Metropolitan police.
The fact remains that Boris who Chairs TFL has after over a year as Mayor not shown any interest in meeting the unions that represent the staff who work for TFL.
But is not surprising given that he seems more interested in electric cars (which still waste as much roadspace) and cyclists and shows no interest in the bulk of people who in London use public transport.
- Melvyn Windebank, Canvey Island, Essex
The RMT drivers are not the only people working for London Underground . You need to take into conideration those who work on the stations . The people who are on the frontline who keep the staions open . Many reports in papers recentley have stated they get payed 30 k and only need an IQ of a 12 year old to do that job . Let's cast our memories back to 7/7 when they all suddenley became needed all of a sudden .The public should be thankful for small things . Because these workers get up at 3 in the morning and go to bed at 3 in the morning to make things run . The job that is being done is not all about letting people through the gates but one of being there for the publics safety , security and assitance .
These people get abused both verbally and physically daily by the public about things such as the service to which they have no control . The idea that tube workers want some massive pay increase is made up by the bosses to make a stike seem not justified . The real issues where clouded in the press . The main things are all about running a safer service and being secure in emplyoyment. The management want to abaandon deals that where made before they left university . If you choose to believe all what you read then fool mug you .
- C L U, ilford essex
much of whats said does ring true the new london overground trains coming in shortly are mostly going to have to be operated by 2 persons because the rmt will nor agree to one man operation without strikes this is one of many instances where the union seems to run the show and management lacks much vision to challenge them hardly ever
- Philip, dalston cumbria
Your telling porkies Colin,RMT have 1800 driver members,ASLEF 1500 and 300 non union members.
Why havnt ASLEF contested the Standards report on 12/06/09 which stated they have 40% of drivers?
We all know why ASLEF leadership wont go into dispute with LU,if they do they will have to provide their membership numbers which will then result in LU reducing the number of Union Reps they have by 30% and increasing RMT representative level accordingly.
Why might ASLEF have disproportionate numbers of Reps now?....because the Union Representative levels is set out in the Machinery negotiation which is 8 years old.
- James Connolly, London ,England
There are only 1400 RMT drivers,the majority are in ASLEF.Their pay is basic with no overtime.They work extra hours each week for no pay which ups their holiday entitlement.Managers have complete control of staffing and operations with minimal union input.Both middle and upper management are full of people brought in from outside the industry on big salaries and with no idea of how to run a railway.
- Colin, barking essex
