UNITY THE KEY

16 Mick Lynch is no stranger to the sharp end of the class struggle. The newly elected RMT general secretary was effectively starved out of the construction industry in the 1990s, a victim of the blacklisting that robbed so many decent trade unionists of their right to earn a living. He is also a veteran of battles against the kind of right-wing gangster trade- unionism that saw his former trade union – the notorious EETPU – kicked out of the TUC for sweetheart-dealing with some of the very bosses who were doing the blacklisting. It was being forced out of construction that brought the west-Londoner onto the railways and into RMT. “I went into Eurostar to hide and earn some money for six months,” he says. More than two decades on, having built Eurostar’s RMT branch from scratch to being one of the union’s biggest, and having been elected twice as assistant general secretary, he finds himself in the hot seat. Lynch can be forgiven for wryly raising an eyebrow at the suggestion made recently by one of the Star’s down-market rivals that he is regarded in the union as a “centrist.” “I am not a centrist,” he says with a sigh. “In my community I am regarded as a radical and a leftist, but of course these things are relative. “What I am, though, is in the mainstream of where our members are. “They want a strong, disciplined union that is ready to fight when it’s appropriate and to use all the weapons at our disposal. “That means professional discussions and negotiations, but it also means that you are properly organised and ready to use industrial action when the members call for it and when we need to,” he says. For Lynch, far more important than such labels are the struggles that will define RMT in the coming years, and he is under no illusion about the severity of the challenges facing the union and the working class in general. “We are entering a very dangerous period, and the union has got to be ready,” he says. Under his leadership, RMT will be “at the cutting edge of the trade-union recovery,” he says, and he hopes that its example will help inspire confidence and a like-minded militancy across the movement to thwart attempts to make working people pay for the Covid crisis. Lynch’s election campaign focused on unity and industrial organisation – the twin prerequisites that he believes will allow the union to counter the aggressive agenda already being set by government and employers. It was an approach that clearly struck a chord with members, as he won comfortably against three credible rivals, all of them also established elected officers. “The ruling class is going to UNITY THE KEY Unity is required for the battles ahead, newly elected RMT general secretary Mick Lynch tells Morning Star industrial reporter Derek Kotz