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Eight hundred jobs
The Mayor of London claims that the abolition of these 800 posts can be achieved without resort to compulsory redundancies, and that Underground stations are currently over-staffed. The trade unions point out that cutting staff will reduce safety and levels of service to the public. But, if the workers lose the dispute and the cuts are implemented, there will be a further effect. The number of Londoners who have jobs will be reduced by eight hundred; that is, in a city where unemployment is already 9%, with the jobless rate among those aged 16 to 24 at 21%.
In one of the world's richest cities, the centre of global finance, over one fifth of young people cannot find work. Boris Johnson has no proposals to create any new jobs to replace those which he is intent on abolishing.
The 800 jobs which are at stake in this strike are a mere drop in the ocean in terms of the present numbers of unemployed, 2.4 million in the UK; and the proposed job cuts on the Tube system are merely among the first in the Tory government's overall programme of massive reductions in the public sector, which will result in a cut of a further 1.3 million in the number of jobs available in Britain as a whole. But this dispute matters, and not only to those who will be immediately affected by its outcome.
RMT union official Janine Booth, who lives in the London Borough of Hackney, explained eloquently in a small-circulation local newsletter:
Most of us travel around London regularly, and when we travel by Tube, we need staff to help with directions, tickets, service disruptions and emergencies. Yet LU management - and their political masters in the Mayor's office - plan to cut 800 jobs and cut ticket office opening times by nearly 7,500 hours.
450 ticket-selling jobs could go, plus hundreds of Customer Service Assistants - the station staff who work on the gatelines and platforms, making announcements, giving information, carrying out security checks, assisting drivers, helping disabled passengers and evacuating stations in emergencies.
This will leave passengers to travel with little assistance around a less safe and secure network. The remaining staff will be overworked and vulnerable.
Ms Booth added:
And there will be 800 fewer jobs for unemployed Londoners and school-leavers - including those in Hackney.
The unions also believe that this round of job cuts will be followed by futher cuts in Tube drivers, stations supervisors, service control and other staff.
As is the norm in a Western democracy, such considerations are drowned out by the mass media which argues on behalf of the bosses, and seeks to strengthen their resolve. On Friday 3rd September the London Evening Standard editorialised:
Barring the unexpected, London will be thrown into chaos on Monday by a 24-hour Tube strike. But this is a more important confrontation than other recent ones on the Underground: whatever the disruption, the Mayor and Transport for London must stand firm.
At issue are planned cuts of 800 ticket office and administrative posts, although London Underground has promised there will be no compulsory redundancies. The Oyster system has led to a huge fall in ticket-office sales: some sell fewer than 10 tickets an hour. A re-organisation is inevitable, especially in these cash-strapped times.
There is more than one level of assumption here. The first and most obvious is that the introduction of new technology, in the form of the Oyster card system, makes it possible- without drastically worsening safety and passenger service- to have a massive job cull. This, at the very least, is disputable; ticket offices at some stations are already closed for much of the time, there are frequently long queues at the ticket offices which are open, and the presence of customer care staff is minimal on much of the network.
Why are we working?
Beneath this, the Evening Standard editors, along with the Tube senior management and London Mayor who they are backing, assume that if a job possibly can be cut, it must be cut; or to put it another way, if a means can be found to reduce the number of jobs available and thus increase unemployment, then as a matter of principle that means should be utilised.
That principle is based on a deeper assumption, about why jobs should- or should not- exist.
Why do people work? People labour in order to produce useful things- material objects or services which, under capitalism, are usually traded on the market to create a profit for the employer; or, as in the case of public sector organisations such as London Underground, alongside its essential role for the individual users of the service, to facilitate the profit-making activities of capitalist firms. Without the mundane functions of the Tube system and its modestly paid workers, the flashy and ultra-lucrative financial centres of the City of London would be wiped off the global economic map.
But if you ask yourself, or anybody else, why do you go to work- in other words, what purpose does your job serve, for you? - then you will encounter the role of work, for the worker, and also for the family, friends, neighbours and colleagues of that worker. First and not least, a job allows one to earn an income, by which to support oneself, ones children or other dependants, and, in most cases, to enjoy some minor luxuries. Also in most cases, the job allows the worker to engage with others in the course of purposeful activity, and to aquire self-respect by knowing that they are contributing to wider society. For the majority of people, this is a psychological necessity.
Deprived of jobs, especially decent jobs, individuals and communities fall apart. Yet capitalist ideology insists that the state has no responsibility to ensure that work is available to everybody. This, supposedly, is up to the market- but whatever the market is currently supplying, it is not supplying work for the unemployed and it shows no signs of doing so.
The jobs that the Tube workers are defending are decent jobs. Work on the London Underground means a union-negotiated salary, working conditions, holidays, and pension scheme. If the strikers fail in their objective, not only will an additional 800 people be unemployed, but those eight hundred will be be competing with the rest of the increasingly desperate jobless for posts which already have generally lower pay and benefits than those of Underground staff; thus, by the laws of supply and demand, helping to drive average wages and conditions further down towards the statutory minimums. And, though so far unrevealed, this government may yet have plans to reduce or abolish those statutory minimum levels.
The Evening Standard is correct to note the importance of this dispute. Grimly (or eagerly, in the case of the right-wing radicals) awaiting the announcement on 20th October of the major public sector cuts, we have been since the Tory-Liberal government took office in a hiatus, described aptly by various commentators as the Phoney War. But in Britain's capital city, the first of the main cuts is arriving early- and so is the beginning of a fightback. As of today, 6th September 2010, the Phoney War is over.