Simon Jenkins: It’s easy to blame Bob Crow for Tube strike but he’s just doing his job

With the Tube strikes upon us, the RMT boss can flex his muscles because the Mayor won’t stand up to him
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5 February 2014
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The Tube union boss, Bob Crow, is often derided as a ghost of times past, from the days when union leaders “ran the country” and politicians did their bidding. He certainly plays to the stereotype. He earns £145,000 a year, claims to be a communist turned socialist and lives in a Woodford council house. He appeared in the weekend press as masterminding this week’s Tube strike from a luxury cruise liner off Brazil.

But Crow is not a figure from the past. He is more like the cocky Cockney brokers and arbitrage merchants of the City of London. He makes money and does not care for image. He knows his market and knows how to exploit it. He terrifies Labour’s Ed Miliband.

Crow’s Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is growing and successful but his aristocrats are the London Tube drivers. At a basic £44,000 salary plus perks, he has made them among the highest-paid workers in the public sector. True, only 40 per cent of the drivers voted in the recent strike ballot, meaning just 30 per cent voted to stop work. But minority-elected politicians can hardly criticise the RMT for that.

Crow does not have to justify himself to the public or the Tube’s passengers. Nor need he justify himself to the Tube’s political boss, Mayor Boris Johnson, a sort of Bob Crow of the Right. He answers only to his members. They support him because he shows two fingers to the toffs, who cave in and give them more money.

Tonight’s strike is indefensible. It is against the modernisation of the Underground to prepare it for a cashless, driverless future. Today’s passengers can handle machines and cards. A hundred million passengers a year use driverless trains in Docklands, as others do in Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo and elsewhere. What passengers do want is security and assistance on concourses and platforms. And they want all-night trains. Staff must come out from their offices and engage with the customers.

In Pictures: Tube strike (February 2014)

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Transport for London wants these things and has offered RMT a deal with few more than 750 job losses and no compulsory redundancies. But Crow sees such deals as an opportunity for political muscle-flexing, usually ending in a strike threat and demands for money. He calls modernisation “a kick in the teeth for the loyal and experienced Tube workforce … The cuts would hit the vulnerable, the elderly, those with disabilities and women the hardest.” His predecessor said the same when Tube guards were removed — which no one notices these days.

Some of Crow’s drivers are already on more than £60,000 and last year’s burst of RMT militancy secured a basic pay of roughly £52,000 plus perks by 2015. Short of promising his members job and income security for life, rendering modernisation pointless, TfL management can do little to appease him. Their tactic is the familiar one of offering talks “if the strike is called off”. But why should Crow abandon the one weapon he wields with such aplomb? On Monday Johnson slid into that old cliché, that Crow was “holding Londoners to ransom”. Of course he was.

The Tube is still recovering from the trauma of John Prescott’s (really Gordon Brown’s) botched privatisation in 2001. The attempt to separate “track from trains” and split the trains into two companies saw both Metronet and Tube Lines collapse back into Transport for London — at the cost of a staggering £500 million in fees alone. No one has ever been held to account for this Enron-scale shambles. It proved that the Treasury (and Brown) should never be allowed to run so much as a whelk stall.

Meanwhile, the decision of Ken Livingstone, continued by Johnson, to ignore the suburbs and concentrate London’s growth in the ever denser central area has sent Tube travel soaring by 40 per cent in 15 years. Building the low-priority but glamorous Crossrail sucked investment and management attention from the surface and suburban lines, where the long-term growth in demand lies. The north-east/south-west Crossrail 2, far more crucial to London’s economy than Crossrail 1, still languishes.

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The chief beneficiaries of this turbulence have been Crow’s members. They can now deal with what they most like: a cosy nationalised industry led by timid politicians. Neither Livingstone nor Johnson has shown any inclination to stand up to union bullying. Terrified of what strikes might do to their popularity, both mayors capitulated time and again. It is they who are reminiscent of Old Labour.

In 2012 Johnson even paid the Tube drivers a bribe of £850 just to work normally during the Olympics fortnight. He has now bribed them again to work on Boxing Day, despite it being in their contracts. Small wonder London’s Tube fares are now the highest of any big city on earth.

Tube drivers may one day be replaced by machines. The Victoria line was designed to run without drivers in the Sixties. But unions are not about efficiency. They are about power to protect outdated jobs and extract money. Thus visitors to New York are amazed to see lifts still operated by unionised elevator workers, even in ultra-modern office blocks. When the world’s underground trains are all automatic, London will still have drivers. The reason is that their starting pay is now ahead of airline pilots, headteachers and pharmacists. Their income is double UK median earnings.

Johnson and others can abuse the RMT as much as they like but it is water off Crow’s back. The Mayor’s job is to deliver a constant, efficient and reasonably priced transport network. In this he is failing. He is not in control of his labour force. Crow’s job is to win money for his members. In this he is succeeding. Until someone stands up to him, he will continue doing so.

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