GETTING THE VOTE OUT

The national industrial organising conference of train crew and shunting grades met in Bournemouth recently with the main focus on one key task, to organise the grades to get the vote out in the rail ballot over jobs, pay and conditions. Conference president Billy Kimm opened the conference and welcomed delegates to the first in person gathering of the grades since 2019. He explained how crucial the event was as an opportunity for activists to exchange experiences from their branches and regions. RMT general secretary Mick Lynch told delegates that the union had no choice but to ballot for industrial action in the face of rail industry plans to slash thousands of jobs and permanently change the way the rail network functions. “They want to enforce a pay freeze, which we've got to bust, they want your jobs to be insecure. My estimation is somewhere between 10 and 15 thousand people will be stripped out the rail system. And even those that keep their jobs will be affected. Because even if you keep the job, your terms and conditions, your working practises, even down to your roster diagrams will be permanently changed. “Even the idea of collective bargaining, collective negotiations, will go out in the window. That is what this agenda is about,” he said. After giving an outline of how grades across the wider industry will be affected, including the abolition of the entire operative grade on Network Rail, the closing of ticket offices and the decimation of on-train catering, Mick hammered home what the plans for the grades represented at the conference will be. “They have said to us expressly in writing that the role of the train crew will be reoriented to customer service and away from operational duties. “For the guards, conductors, they propose a train manager grade that will not have a safety critical role; that's in the documentation we've got. Now that's not their number one priority, that's the second priority after they’ve dealt with stations,” he said. Explaining how far reaching the proposed changes are Mick told conference that the industry has no intention of going back to the timetable that existed pre-Covid. The days of the never-ending upward trend in season ticket sales, ‘the goose that laid the golden egg’ was over,” he said. “Now there are fewer journeys, there's more people travelling on a Saturday and Sunday than there are on a Monday, which is a complete reversal of the last 30 or 40 years of commuting. So, they're saying to our Network Rail people, you must commit to working more weekends and unlimited amounts of weekends and nights. “You must, and this is written down in the documents, include Sunday, in the working week without any compensation, whether it's monetary or time. “They have made it very clear that fundamental change is what they want, without negotiation. But we disabused them of that when they got the formal notification of the ballot,” Mick said. RMT president Alex Gordon congratulated Billy Kimm, conference secretary Neil Sharples, and the liaison committee for keeping the grades’ meetings and conference going over the last two years and Dorset Rail branch for hosting this year’s event. Talking about the immediate tasks that the grades faced he said: “We will never be able to recreate this moment. This organising conference is a moment you should remember because it's when we had a possibility to really make some changes for GETTING THE VOTE OUT Train crew and shunters organising conference calls for maximum turn out in national strike ballot RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: may 2022 :: RMTnews 16