VIEW FROM THE P-WAY/LETTERS

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: june 2015 :: RMTnews 26 M y colleague Braňo is a 50- something Slovak, with a full head of copper-brown hair. He's short of stature, and seldom shaven, with bright blue eyes, and the Asiatic cheeks you often see on the faces of those Eastern European descendants of the Mongol Horde. He is a humble and an hardworking man, a canny and experienced groundworker, and he's old school. He's a socialist in his own words, a man with a heart with five kids and a wife and a squad of grandchildren, all back in Central Slovakia. He sends all his money back to them and every night after work gets the train back in the direction of London to Ealing Broadway, then makes the arduously long bus journey to the spartan box room he rents in Finchley. Inconveniencing himself in this way, he saves more money for his family by avoiding Zone One and so he returns each morning, his life, his whole person, spent on his foreign family. Spent on them, but spent for England, boys and girls. For the tumour in her we call London, and the unsightly black vein coursing through it, her bloody railway in slick steel and grease. This morning we were out again delivering notices of weekend piling works to local residents. 'More noise?' they say as you meet them letting the cat out or taking the kids to school. 'Well at least your house'll go up in price once we're done!' you hear yourself say. They smile, you scowl, first at yourself, at them, then at London. You scowl, because today Braňo got chucked off our job without notice, without severance, after 18 months' continuous service, 13 days on, one day off. His ticket expired, his 'Personal Track Safety' competency, and the agency chose not to renew it. Recently, there has been a spate of near fatal incidents and other accidents, often involving staff they have supplied, allegedly due to 'communication issues'. Fearful for their contract, and keen to be seen to be doing something, they scapegoated Bra o, on grounds of poor English. Now Braňo, his English isn't that bad in all fairness. But Braňo is disposable. Braňo is like me, like all of us, like the vast majority of trackworkers in the UK, a man without the most basic of employment rights. In the media there is often a lot of talk of zero hours contracts. But there are millions of workers in this country without even a zero hours contract, those of us who are considered to be 'self-employed', though we had no say in the matter, though we apply for jobs and work our shifts like anybody else. We are the lowest of the low, the least of the least, we toilers who could stop any train, who could demand the world but are beaten back from it. From every corner of the world we come floating like scum on the top of London's cauldron, Brazilian, Punjabi, Scouser and Pole and so we scowl, we the scum of the earth. For what is there to tell us otherwise, what dignity have we more than this work that steals from us so much of our lives? What recognition agreement have we, what holiday or sick pay? We wallow in muck and drains and break our backs in ballast with one day off a fortnight, the world only looks at us like the wretches we are, grey folk in bright orange. We live in a world where the union is a secret organisation, where even joining it in anything other than the strictest secrecy could leave you sacked and worse, A VIEW FROM THE P-WAY