Regular users of the Alton and Portsmouth lines were greatly inconvenienced by rail strikes.
Workers couldn’t get to work. Students couldn’t get to school or college. Others had to postpone medical appointments or missed out on seeing family and friends.
Rail strikes affected so many people locally, and they cost the economy big, too.
You can see why many may breathe a sigh of relief at the inflation-busting pay award given to the union ASLEF and say: “if it means an end to strikes, it’s worth it”. But does it?
Railway staff perform an essential service and do an incredibly valuable job, there’s no doubt about that. And everyone should be paid fairly for what they do.
But that award will cost over £100m at a time when pensioners on a fraction of their income are set to lose their winter fuel payments. Government ministers have spoken frequently about having “no choice” but to cut the winter fuel payment because of what they claim is a “black hole” in the finances (it isn’t, as I’ve written here before).
Don’t get me wrong. I do want rail workers to be paid more. But I also know that we need productivity gains to bring down costs for fare-payers and taxpayers, match other countries’ rail systems, and secure the future of train travel.
Productivity is key to economic growth and affording quality public services. Growth is what Labour ministers claim they’re all about. They are right in having that goal.
But union bosses boast that this award comes with “no strings attached”. “No strings” is another way of saying “no productivity agreement”.
At our party conference last week, Jeremy Hunt reminded us that of all the productivity improvements that government can seek to drive, the most obvious place to start looking is the public sector, because this is the part of the economy – a big part – which the government has most direct traction with. The large funding increase he allocated to the NHS was accompanied by an ambitious productivity plan that came from the NHS itself. We need more of this, not less.
Then there’s the question of whether the pay awards actually will stop strikes or limit the disruption they cause. No sooner was the ink dry on the ASLEF agreement than more industrial action was put forward, in relation to a different dispute.
The government have already said they will not honour our commitment to ensure minimum service levels during strikes, nor retain our minimum threshold for industrial action. But there’s a bigger risk coming.
Labour ministers’ argument that “strikes cost x, and giving this pay award costs less than that” has a short-term logic to it, without doubt. But if you’re a union boss, don’t you quickly see that that logic will always hold and so you can continue to demand more, without offering reforms and productivity gains in return?
I hope I’m proved wrong. But I fear I may not be.
