Cymraeg The Landworkers’ Alliance wishes to send a message of solidarity to the 40,000 members of the Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport (RMT) taking strike action today.
The workers taking this action include guards, signallers, maintenance and catering staff who are striking against a multipronged attack on their working conditions by Network Rail and the 14 Train Operating Companies. These including proposed £2bn of cuts to the rail system which will result in 2,500 fewer maintenance staff and 625,000 fewer hours of maintenance, the closure of 1,000 ticket offices, and an 8% pay rise over two years at a time when the RPI rate of inflation is already running at 11.4%. The RMT is striking against policies that threaten to make the railways less safe and less viable as a system of transport, when the extreme heatwaves of last week have foregrounded the necessity of transitioning to a transport system based on public provision rather than private vehicles.
This comes as likely Prime Minister-to-be Liz Truss pledges to restrict the fundamental right of rail workers to strike, and the introduction of new legislation that will allow companies to hire agency workers to replace strikers. These proposals will make it harder for everyone to defend themselves from companies who care more about their rates of profit than their workers and the people using their service.
These cuts also come shortly after the Train Operating Companies turned a £600m profit. In 2020, the Rolling Stock Companies, who own the trains, paid out almost £1bn in dividends to their shareholders. We recognise the similarities between the relationship that the Train Operating Companies have with the rail system and its workforce to the relationship that industrial agribusiness has with the food system. It is an extractive relationship that seeks to take as much value out of the system as possible, with little care for the damage that this practice does to the railways and the people that work them.
As a union of landworkers, peasants and small farmers, we try to place ourselves in the traditions of the wider labour movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were famously deported to Australia in 1834 for breaking the Combination Laws that prevented workers from forming trade unions, were agricultural workers themselves. We also recognise the essential role that the fight for better wages and working conditions plays in the struggle for a better food system. For too long cheap, mass- produced food has been used by successive government as an alternative to social policies that would increase incomes for working people. Only through the maintenance of an industrial food system, whose true costs of environmental destruction and superexploitation of agricultural workers are not reflected in their price at the supermarket, can a system that continually seeks to reduce wages sustain itself.
In light of this, we encourage our members to attend the RMT’s picket lines at their local stations. You can find details of the locations and times of these picket lines on the RMT’s website. If you can make it to a picket line, we encourage you to wear LWA merch and bring LWA banners to show our solidarity, and to share your photos on social media by tagging @LandworkersUK on Twitter, or @landworkersalliance on Instagram.
