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There is no reason why Tube drivers on objectively high incomes with working conditions many would kill for are able to force their employers to ask of them even fewer hours and even more pay – and the employers are forbidden by the state from simply hiring other people, says Tom Harwood
I’m just going to say it. Strikes are dumb. Antiquated. Anachronistic. Utterly out of step with the modern world. And I’m not just saying this now because the RMT has been doing its best to ruin my week. Promise.
Yet while the Tubes beneath our feet have been ground to a grudging standstill this week, above the surface a revolution is quietly taking hold.
Like many Londoners, it’s with increasing frequency that I’m spotting Google’s autonomous Waymos whizzing about the city, now beginning to drive themselves. It’s to our international shame that we already have autonomous cars navigating our winding and packed medieval streets before we’ve cracked the automation of one-way trains in dedicated tunnels on single tracks.
This is, clearly, not an issue of technology. It’s one of unionised resistance.
Remarkably, of the entire underground network, just the Piccadilly, Bakerloo and Waterloo & City lines are not mostly automated today. For every other line, automation is such that the job of the “driver” is to simply open and close the doors, and to push a single button to initiate departure.
So here we are, held to ransom as a city by a small gilded elite of tube drivers often earning upwards of £80,000 for a four-day “working” week – whereby “working” is mostly the not all too taxing task of… operating the tube doors and occasionally making an announcement.
Overmanning and underautomating
Overmanning and underautomating is always the result of trade union action. Action that holds companies, cities, sometimes entire countries to ransom in order to drive up costs and drive down efficiency. Nobody wins, save for the few elite lucky enough to be employed by the company before their own union action drives it into the ground.
Strikes seem to be something from a completely different age. Harking back to an era where entire settlements would be reliant on one sole employer. A time where, in many places, the only gainful employment that could be found was with a monopolistic provider – a steelworks, a dockyard a mine. Places where other than that one place of work, there was simply nowhere else to go.
Today we live in a competitive market economy. If you do not like your job, you are at liberty to seek another. I see no reason why Tube drivers on objectively high incomes with working conditions many would kill for are able to force their employers to ask of them even fewer hours and even more pay – and the employers are forbidden by the state from simply hiring other people who would accept their already generous terms. Why do we entrench incumbents and kneecap efficiency in the process?
The American journalist Richard Hanania recently wrote of a thought experiment. “Imagine that a group of customers of a store decided that they weren’t going to shop there until it reduced its prices… Now imagine that government requires that the store negotiate with this group, on everything from the products it carries to what hours it opens… If no deal is reached, it may lead to a shutdown of the store.”
It sounds absurd when we apply the logic of trade union strikes to customers rather than employees. Because we understand that customers, if they do not like a particular shop, can shop elsewhere. But the same is true of employees too.
Why does the law decide that a group of workers can hold their employer to ransom? Why is an employer forbidden from replacing workers that refuse their terms of employment? We should leave this sclerotic system of restrictions on free human action in the last century where it belongs.
In a 21st century city running a semi-automated transport system, it is absurd that well remunerated incumbents can still shut down a city while the law blocks replacement, reform and automation.
Tom Harwood is deputy political editor of GBNews and a City AM columnist