PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

President’s column As we move from a summer of solidarity into an autumn of action let’s assess how far the trade union movement has come in the past year. Look at where we started. Look where we are now. Even before restrictions associated with Covid- 19 had ended, large employers in Britain were already flexing their muscles to ‘fire and rehire’ workers and cut wages. In December 2020 members of Unite the union at British Airways took nine days’ strike action at Heathrow Airport in protest at BA’s plan to fire its workforce and re-employ them on inferior terms and conditions. Unite won a negotiated settlement in January 2021. The same month British Gas owner, Centrica revealed plans to fire and rehire gas engineers. Centrica’s boss called on government ministers to water down Section 188 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act, requiring employers to give 90 days’ notice of redundancy – 30 days if the number of workers dismissed is less than 100. Gas engineers in the GMB union took 42 days of strike action between January and March 2021, but without success. A year later, on 17 March 2022 P&O Ferries illegally dismissed 800 workers without notice, falsely claiming their jobs were redundant, while replacing the sacked workers with low-paid agency staff. P&O upped the ante. This was ‘fire and NOT rehire’. P&O joined the race to the bottom - a low-cost model pioneered in 2003 by Finnish ferry company Viking Line and in 2005 by Irish Ferries. On 22 March 2022 at the Parliamentary Transport and Business Committee inquiry into P&O, Alan Bogg, Professor of Labour Law at the University of Bristol told MPs: “a determined employer with the right legal advice can achieve its goal of reducing terms and conditions with relative ease.” In other words, current UK employment law provides little or no protection to workers. Professor Bogg called for protection from ‘Day 1’ of employment to make dismissal and re- engagement (‘fire and rehire’) unfair if employers fail to reach agreements with trade unions. In the absence of legal protection, workers have had no alternative but to take strike action in 2021 and 2022 defending themselves against employers’ ‘fire and rehire’ tactics. As UK inflation accelerated to 12.3 per cent in July 2022, wages fell behind rising costs of energy, food, housing, and other necessities. Inflation is forecast to be at “very elevated levels” throughout 2023. In these circumstances, it’s little wonder that RMT is joining with other unions at this year’s TUC Congress calling for coordinated action, including demonstrations, national and regional rallies, and coordinated industrial action where possible. RMT calls on the TUC to plan and encourage coordinated strike action between affiliates to maximise our impact and effectiveness. I am proud that RMT’s National Executive has continued to fight against rail bosses’ threats to close railway booking offices, reintroduce Driver- only operation and scrap thousands of key engineering, operations and customer service jobs across the rail industry. This union will also be supporting the TUC mass-lobby of Parliament on Wednesday 19 October as well as the People's Assembly's lobby of the Tory Party Conference on Saturday October 1 and National Demonstration in London on Saturday November 5. Let’s get on the streets in our millions this autumn to make it clear to our new Prime minister that the working class won’t pay the price for greedy profiteers and imperialist wars. Unity is strength. Alex Gordon AN AUTUMN OF ACTION RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 ::september 2022 :: RMTnews 27 was confusing and traumatic from my parent’s generation. The Black and White minstrel show aired every Saturday on the BBC from 1958-1978 providing Lenny Henry with his first gig. Protests were made in 1967 only to be replied with an all too commonly used phrase: “it’s not about race”. When tracing the roots of blackface minstrelsy in all of its evolutionary branches for the last 200 years, you cannot deny it certainly is about race. You cannot deny ways in which black culture is consumed without a second thought by people who don’t respect, value or humanise black people. You cannot deny the effect of these racist portrayals in popular culture on systemic racism internationally for centuries. You cannot deny how these hurtful caricatures have affected the way some black people see themselves, as well as how they see other black people. We have a bad habit in Britain of not dealing with the root of a problem and just cutting off the branch. Whilst removing TV shows off streaming platforms for the use of blackface is something it is still only a branch. To really address this racial pandemic of the last few centuries we need to be brave and address the roots honestly. 1 Alan Bogg, Firing and Rehiring: An agenda for reform, Institute for Employment Rights, 9 October 2020 2 Bank of England Monetary Policy Report, August 2022, Monetary Policy Summary Judy Garland