Do the Tories have the most to lose from rail strikes?

For the Conservative Party right now, every voter counts – another round of walkouts and ensuing chaos could be the final nail in the coffin, writes Sean O’Grady

Aslef has announced a round of strikes this week (PA)

The train drivers, ie members of Aslef, are on strike again, and with quite an ambitious programme of industrial action, as the travelling public has realised. In fact, this is the third successive year when train services have been seriously disrupted by industrial action, much to the frustration of ministers.

The drivers will stop work between Tuesday 30 January and Monday 5 February. Thousands of trains are likely to be cancelled every day. The effect will be exacerbated by a nine-day ban on overtime running from 29 January to 6 February.

Because of short-staffing, regular overtime is one way the train operators can keep services running under their franchise agreements – it’s essential.

Although these strikes are the work of Aslef rather than the RMT, and the RMT won’t strike again until the spring at the earliest, there is every chance that disruption will drag on through 2024 – which no one needs reminding is an election year.

We also all know the effects of the strike will be misery for passengers and businesses that rely on commuters; but what might the political impact be?

Who’s affected?

Virtually anyone who wants to get on a train, except for people in Northern Ireland and ScotRail users. So the main impact is, obviously, on commuters, and these can very often be found in the towns, villages and suburbs of our cities – often as not now marginal battleground territory for the main parties. Such a crucial slice of the electorate has also been hit hard, and for many years, by steep increases in fares, routinely overcrowded, mucky and unreliable services, as well as incessant strike action. So they’re an unhappy lot.

Who does the public blame?

Polling during the last round of strikes tended to show they blamed the government more than the rail unions, though, as with the NHS strike, the longer things dragged on the less sympathy was extended to the workers. There’s also a general mood, fair or not, that privatisation has been a failure, albeit the ironic twist is that all the rail infrastructure and many of the services have now passed back into the hands of the UK government. So the chances are that the Conservatives will suffer more than Labour and that the Opposition parties will find grievances about public transport a fruitful source of support as polling day nears. Tory attacks on Labour’s links to its “union paymasters” are rather undermined by the fact that the RMT disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004. It also seems that the Tory policy of passing ever tougher anti-union laws doesn’t have the desired effect…

Didn’t the government just pass a law guaranteeing minimum service levels? 

Yes, but the legislation, like some other recent law-making, such as on migration, has been found to be utterly ineffective. This is for two reasons. First, the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 only applies to actual strike actions; some of the forthcoming industrial action takes the form of overtime bans, and no employer can yet force an employee to work overtime. Second, and more significantly, the train operators don’t want to make the existing disputes even more bitter by trying to make unwilling strikers turn up to drive trains against their will, losing even more goodwill and cooperation. More decisively, Aslef have told them that any attempt to impose the minimum service guarantees will simply result in more strike days and overtime bans.

It’s also worth noting that the law passed a few years ago raising the threshold for a strike ballot hasn’t made any impact so far as the railways are concerned (though it did succeed in thwarting one of the teaching unions last year). 

What is behind all these strikes?

Inflation is the main cause, and behind that a serious shortage of labour throughout the economy, caused by a mixture of Brexit and long Covid. In times of high employment and skills shortages, workers tend to have more bargaining power. Union militancy and employment law tend to have less impact than market forces. 

Could the government make any political capital out of the rail strikes?

They might if they were a bit better at politics. Labour’s usual reply to any questions about strike action anywhere is to “urge both sides to get round the negotiating table”, with little indication about what Labour would do (which does suggest that things would be a little different for Starmer and his colleagues). Thus far the Tories haven’t found asking Labour to condemn a wide variety of strikes to have been much use – the Conservatives are so unpopular, people are inclined to hold them responsible for the weather. 

What the Tories could do is propose some extra-tough new laws in their manifesto, and they might even consider banning strikes in some sectors of the economy in exchange for more genuinely independent binding pay review bodies. Or they could attack Labour’s present policies on industrial relations, which businesses might find rather challenging…

So what would Labour do?

They might well make striking more effective. It would therefore also be interesting to know which, if any, of the industrial relations legislation passed since 2010 that Labour would amend or repeal. In 2019, for example, Labour proposed the revolutionary move of implementing sectoral collective bargaining, among many other radical extensions of workers’ rights – meaning that, say, a dispute between one union and one supermarket over a retail sector pay deal might plunge the whole sector into chaos with a lawful national strike. This is actually still policy. 

Angela Rayner, deputy leader and shadow secretary of state for the future of work, has published a “green paper” on the New Deal for Workers’ Rights and last October she said it would represent “the biggest upgrade of workers’ rights in a generation”. Labour will strengthen the protections afforded to all workers by banning zero-hours contracts, ending fire and rehire, and removing qualifying periods for basic rights, and more.

That “more” includes this passage in the green paper: “Labour will empower workers to act collectively via the rollout of fair pay agreements. Fair pay agreements will be negotiated through sectoral collective bargaining, reversing the decades-long decline in collective bargaining coverage. Worker representatives and employer representatives would be brought together to negotiate fair pay agreements that establish minimum terms and conditions, which would be binding on all employers and workers in the sector.

“The agreements would cover a wide range of issues including, but not limited to, pay and pensions, working time and holidays, training, work organisation, diversity and inclusion, health and safety, and the deployment of new technologies.”

Starmer and Rayner will probably not let any of that into the election manifesto, but then that would beg the question of how different things might be for the working classes under Labour.