Last week, a trade union badly damaged the legitimacy of collective action - and achieved nothing. By going on strike after having won almost all its demands, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers closed down the London Underground for 48 hours, delivering all too predictable chaos. If it had been over a vital matter of principle, Londoners might have understood.But by deciding to return to work for, essentially, the same promises over redundancies, rights and pensions that had been made beforehand, it has only confirmed millions of people's doubts about unionism and reminded every Londoner over 40 - and many others in Britain - of the trigger-happy striking of the 1970s and 80s, when support for a fundamental principle of unionism was shaken irretrievably. Bob Crow, leader of the RMT, is doing the same today.
The ex-communist and proud member of the 'awkward squad' of trade union leaders doesn't see it that way. Nor, significantly and tragically, do many on the executive teams of Britain's trade union movement. For weeks, Crow had warned the employers, Transport for London, of the union's concerns about how workers would be treated in the reconstruction of Metronet, the bankrupt contractor which had run two-thirds of London Underground as part of the ill-conceived public private partnership. The other unions might have been assuaged by undertakings; he wasn't. He balloted his members, got the backing he wanted and exercised the right to strike and did get slightly tougher assurances as a result. So what's the problem?
Everything. Crow, and the union movement that will not offer a word of public criticism of him at the TUC annual conference this week, face a titanic task. Trade union membership has declined by six million since its peak in 1980; if over the last two years it has begun to stabilise, that is because of the rise in more heavily unionised public-sector employment rather than any expansion in the private sector. The union movement remains locked in a crisis of purpose, image and ideology that could end any effective presence beyond the public sector. Crow, and the world view he represents, is part of the problem rather than the solution.
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