LABOUR’S NEW DEAL – AN OPPORTUNITY FOR INSOURCING

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: july/august 2024 :: RMTnews 8 L abour’s emphatic election victory presents the union with a real opportunity to press home the campaign on insourcing - bringing outsourced workers back in- house. The Party went into the election with a manifesto that promised to implement the New Deal for Working People in full. The final text of the New Deal was the subject of some pre-election debate and even though the union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, RMT recognised the importance of this debate and was fully engaged, including organising a high-profile event in Westminster at which Shadow Employment Minister Justine Madders (now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Business and Trade) directly addressed outsourced workers from the RMT, Unite and PCS unions. The final text of the New Deal, agreed with affiliated unions, did include crucial wording on insourcing. The document said that in government Labour would ‘learn the lessons from the collapse of Carillion and bring about the biggest wave of insourcing of public services in a generation’. This includes a commitment to ‘examine public services that have been outsourced as part of our drive to improve quality, design better services to meet changing needs, ensure greater stability and longer-term investment in the workforce, and deliver better value for money’. An Employment Bill will be announced in the King’s Speech which will contain elements of the New Deal. In the rail sector, the King’s Speech will also include legislation that will assist the process of returning private rail operators’ contracts back into the public sector and create Great British Railways, the start of a process of radical change on our railways which represents a significant step in the right direction. It also presents the union with genuine opportunities in our campaign for the re- integration of public service workforces. 30 YEARS OF PRIVATISATION There is a lot to do. The inheritance of 30 years of privatisation on rail, for example, is a chaotically fragmented workforce. Each privatised train operating company (not to mention the ones already back in the public sector) has outsourced key functions it saw as ‘ancillary’ or ‘non-core’, including cleaners, caterers, gateline workers and so on. Network Rail outsourced more than 2,000 cleaners to outsourcing giant Mitie PLC. Best estimates suggest that more than 5,000 of these ‘ancillary’ rail workers are outsourced by the train operating companies and Network Rail. Within Transport for London (TfL) too, over the years, supposedly ‘non-core’ facilities management functions were outsourced, leaving around 3,000 such workers employed by the likes of ABM, Mitie and Sodexo. All these workers share a common experience: no sick pay to speak of, pitiful pensions that will leave them struggling in retirement, pay rates bunched around the National Minimum or Living Wages, long working hours and heavy workloads as companies cut headcount to sweat out profits and a working life characterised by precariousness. MAINTENANCE WORKERS Precarious work in a fragmented supply chain also pervades the maintenance and renewal of rail’s infrastructure. Network Rail’s renewals work was hived off to the Infracos in LABOUR’S NEW DEAL – AN OPPORTUNITY FOR INSOURCING INSOURCE: RMT members staged a protest at City Hall recently to insist Transport for London insource all outsourced workers. Thousands of contracted out workers suffer from poor pay, no sick pay, inadequate pensions, and lack staff travel benefits.