Trade Unionism

Born in the East End of London, Bob Crow was influenced politically and culturally by his father — a docker, union activist, and communist. Growing up at a time of high union activity, he would remark, “When we used to come home at 6 o’clock at night, the news was always on and old man had an opinion about everything. All the big industries were unionized. All my mates’ dads’ families were in unions. It was just a fact of life.”

Teaching him to read both the Morning Star, the daily communist newspaper, and the Financial Times, the newspaper of financiers, but to distrust the latter, Crow’s father provided him with an informal class education.

After leaving Hainault High School in Essex at sixteen, the young Crow went to work in London Transport, where he acquired his first taste of trade unionism. Victimized at work by his supervisor for speaking his mind, he attended his first union meeting whereupon, showing some steel, he was asked to become a committee member. This began his involvement and education in the RMT, its forerunner the National Union of Railywaymen (NUR), and the wider union movement.

Following his father into the Communist Party, where his political education became formalized, Crow held a number of important branch positions before being elected to the national executive of his union. He was known for his hard work, personal confidence, and ability to articulate members’ grievances. He became noticed at a national level when he was engaged in the first big fight on the London Underground against job losses and changes to terms and conditions in the early 1990s. This provided the basis for him to successfully challenge the incumbent for the post of assistant general secretary (the union’s number-three position).

In this time, he showed he was able to work with others on the Left, put forward militant demands, and conclude negotiations with signed agreements. Critical of the leadership of Jimmy Knapp, who he saw as steering the union too far from its members, Crow built a base among the union’s rank-and-file for a more militant approach. It was this that won him his position as RMT general secretary after Knapp passed on in 2001, winning the 2002 election in a landslide with two-thirds of the vote.

From 2002 to 2014, Crow was the unassailable leader of the RMT. Under him, its finances were sorted out, its membership grew by 25 percent, and, crucially, pay was improved and conditions were defended, even through years of austerity. This was achieved by frequent hard-hitting and successful bouts of industrial action.

But he was able to use the threat of strike action just as well — as two prominent examples on the London Underground and in the North Sea show. In the former, in 2007, when following the threat of a three-day strike, the Metronet consortium which maintained most underground lines, ended its plans to outsource 250 maintenance workers and the contract was brought back in house by Transport for London. The dispute was fought and won by Crow’s own branch, a testament to the fighting spirit he had built. In the latter, in 2006, RMT-organized drivers gained a 45 percent pay raise over two years after threatening to strike in response to a 37 percent raise over three years.

Bob Crow innovated in his tactics, never allowing those he practiced to become stale. This is why his union was at the forefront in promoting media-friendly, colorful demonstrations at strikes, even when believing the workers’ organization itself was the basis of victory. He believed in transformational leadership that sought to impart collective confidence and certainty in members: the confidence to fight and the certainty that the battles could be won. He understood that leaders develop socially and politically. Some skills and traits can be taught but others are generated organically. Thus, classroom lessons and mentoring are useful but they cannot substitute for being hardened in the heat of the battle (inside the union, and against the employer).

Under Bob Crow, the RMT was prepared to work with others but was always ready to rely on its own members. It didn’t allow a relatively conservative union movement to hold it back but, by the same token, didn’t push too far head in a way that the union became isolated. For example, the RMT under Crow worked with the likes of the firefighters’, prison officers’, and civil servants’ unions to push for a general strike against government austerity programs. They got so far as to get the overarching union body, the Trades Union Congress, to at least agree to look at the logistical issues of mounting such an action.

It was not long before Crow became the bête noire of the mainstream media. Whether it was his bargaining tactics, choice of foreign holidays or the kind of dog (a pitbull called Castro) he owned, he was relentlessly attacked and pursued. The London Evening Standard’s headline of “The Most Hated Man in London” soon became “The Most Hated Man in Britain” in the hands of other newspapers.

Indeed, the political attacks were personal as much as the personal attacks became political. But schooled in the heat of battle, Crow was able to give as good as he got. When he was attacked by the Daily Mail for going on holiday to Copacabana during a tube strike, he not only pointed out that it didn’t matter where he was because the management wouldn’t  negotiate with him but that he booked the holiday after seeing the advert for it in the Daily Mail! ‘What do you want me to do,” he said, “sit under a tree and read Karl Marx every day?’”

As Jeremy Corbyn remarked shortly after Crow’s death, “Bob was grossly and abominably misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. Because he had an authentic London accent and supported Millwall [his local football team], they decided that all of their characterizations of the London working-class were embodied in Bob Crow. They were wrong about the London working-class, they were wrong about Bob Crow.”

Crow defended the social gains built by trade union militancy. In a 2010 Guardian interview he would say, “people think the seventies were bad times but I think they were fantastic … There were jobs everywhere, people would come out of one job and into another.” In the 1970s a majority of workers in Britain were in trade unions; today it is less than a quarter. “Why was it that in 1978 we had twelve and a half million union members in this country,” Crow asked, “compared to now where we’ve got six and a half million? Why did people join in ‘78? ‘Cos the unions had teeth.”

That was the trade unionism he sought to rekindle with the RMT. So successful were his methods that, by the time of his passing, subway engineers in London were earning almost twice the national average wage at £52,000 per year. As London Mayor Ken Livingstone remarked on Crow’s death, “the only working-class people who still have well-paid jobs in this city are his members.”

Such was Bob Crow’s impact on the RMT that his successor, Mick Cash, pledged that he would carry on with Crow’s militant legacy. This was despite Cash’s unsuccessful challenge to Crow for assistant general secretary in 1999 being fought on the basis that the RMT had become too militant. However, in one of the longest running disputes on the railways in living memory, the forcefulness of Crow is clearly being missed by the RMT. Starting in the spring of 2016, the Southern Trains dispute, over the removal of the safety role of guards, has lasted for over a year and witnessed some thirty days of strike action.

Lessons for Struggle

Crow’s success as a trade union leader owed much to his understanding of the specific contours and configurations of the power resources of rail workers. Crucial and distinctive factors include the monopoly nature of the service they provide, the immediate and dramatic impact of their strike, the wide economic and political impacts, and the reality, in many cases, of increasing passenger numbers. Successful struggles on the basis of these factors have helped to develop high levels of union and occupational identity among rail workers in Britain.

There are specificities to rail workers that cannot be applied to other workers in a dogmatic way. The reason Bob Crow’s socialist perspective in trade unionism was so important was that it allowed him to see the wood and not the trees, to be able to abstract the general from the particular. Under capitalism, capital exploits labor but, in doing so, it is also dependent upon the cooperation and consent of labor. The corollary to this is that labor has an incentive to name the price for its consent and cooperation. This was a key lesson Bob Crow learned. In doing so, he recognized that working in call centers, for example, does not provide as much collective leverage over capital as working on the railways.

But he was always keen to stress to other workers (and their unions) the need to locate the sources and points of potential leverage in terms of the fragility of the work systems they operate, whether as a result of just-in-time production techniques or particular events. Thus, for example, workers whose jobs are being outsourced or offshored can refuse to help train their replacements, office workers can threaten to slow down the flow of work in the run-up to time-critical audits, and lorry drivers can disrupt finely tuned delivery systems with short, selective action. Crow understood that a strike was only part of a range of tactics trade unions need to deploy to win their battles.

Indeed, Crow supported the workers and their rank-and file organization in the 2012 dispute over the Buildings and Engineering Services National Agreement (BESNA) where construction workers and their supporters blocked site entrances, stopping time-critical deliveries of material getting on site. By holding up work, they were able to defend their national agreement on pay and conditions. The innovation here was twofold: firstly, to see a building site as a just-in-time production process (like a factory making cars) and to apply pressure on its weak points by flash mobbing its entrances; and secondly, to deploy construction workers and their supporters in an unofficial manner so that no union could be held legally and financially responsible for organizing unballoted industrial action.

This is the kind of action that Bob Crow argued for and it is why he went on a number of occasions to support these construction workers’ struggles and speak at their rallies. It was also why he did the same when other construction workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in 2009 walked out on unofficial strike against wage undercutting and used flying pickets to bring out their fellow workers elsewhere.

Crow also showed that strikes can seldom rely upon wielding solely economic or political power — he showed that they have to be able to complement their main source of power, whether economic or political, with the other. Notwithstanding the increasing indemnity provided by the state in Britain to cover losses from strikes, rail workers’ power is firstly economic. But then, because of the integral role of rail services to the rest of the wider economy and society, political power is derived from the consequent disruption. Of course, on the London Underground, the reverse was true given that the service remains largely in public hands. Thus, political power was exercised first, followed by economic power.

This perspective of the forensic analysis of employer operations can be applied to the increasingly fragmented nature of the economy where supply chains are progressively longer, more complex, and global with not just contracting and subcontracting but sub- subcontracting as well. Here, the practice of the RMT under Crow was to highlight that the weak links in the chains of capitalist production, distribution, and exchange must be identified and then mercilessly targeted with effective pressure if the levels of exploitation are to be reduced and ameliorated.

Politics

Politically, Crow took a number of steps to try to rebuild the radical left. Having left the Communist Party to join the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) established by then miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, he then left the SLP and was never a member of any other political party. The RMT was expelled from the Labour Party in 2004, ostensibly over its links with the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). But in reality, the union which helped found the party as the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants in 1900 had become distant from the “New Labour” project spearheaded by Tony Blair. Under Crow, financial support for the Labour Party fell from £180,000 to £12,500 as its pro-market orientation clashed with the RMT’s socialist policies.

Bob Crow was, however, a friend of Jeremy Corbyn, who penned a tribute to the trade union leader in the Morning Star after his death. “Whenever I travel anywhere in Britain,” the now-leader of the Labour Party wrote, “I talk to railway workers and am always touched by the number of them who proudly wear their RMT badge and state their pride in their union membership, and how their general secretary Bob Crow represented them.”

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn would have presented profound challenges to Crow. At the 2007 RMT AGM he had remarked, “any hope of the Labour Party working for workers is dead, finished, over.” He often said that the three major parties in British politics shared three policies in common: support for privatization, anti-trade union laws, and illegal wars. Corbyn’s ascent has changed that dynamic. But it may not prove Crow’s view that the Labour Party was a dead end for workers as wrong as it once seemed. By the spring of 2017, it is clear that even a left-wing leader of Labour will be stymied by the right-wing members of parliament and the party apparatchiks.

In place of Labour, Bob Crow put his efforts into supporting left unity projects such as the SSP and Socialist Alliance. But, when these imploded, he took the initiative through the RMT to establish a number of conferences which led to the establishment of the National Shop Stewards’ Network, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and NO2EU. The latter two organizations contested local and parliamentary elections, and European Union elections respectively but did not achieve any great success in the barren political landscape for the Left before 2014.

A self-described communist, Crow was committed to internationalism. A prominent supporter of the liberation struggles of Cuba, Palestine, South Africa, and Venezuela, he consistently championed fellow workers, especially those in rail and transport, in other countries. In his final interview he would remark, “I have more in common with a Chinese laborer than I have with a City of London stockbroker.” Crow was also a committed antiwar activist and supporter of the Stop the War campaign. He traveled to America on a peace tour and spoke prominently at the giant 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War in Hyde Park. There, he encouraged workers present to be prepared to “occupy their industries” to prevent the march towards war. Fittingly, a battalion in the international brigades defending Rojava has been named in his honor.

These attitudes and actions sprang from his understanding of the world divided into two social classes, of capital and labor. He was able to see that the hostility and struggle between the two, where capital was for most of the time the stronger party, played out in many different ways. His support for the liberation struggles of Cuba, Palestine, South Africa, and Venezuela flowed from this analysis.

More than anything else politically, Bob Crow was defined by his opposition to capitalism. “Capitalism operates on the basis that a small elite are looked after by the many,” he said, “that you create a system of mass unemployment on one hand and anti-trade-union laws on the other to emasculate workers fighting back.” While he did not consider himself an “intellectual,” he often referred to Marx, especially his Wages, Prices and Profit, saying “as long as there are capitalists Marx will remain relevant.”

No matter how forceful, skilled, and class-conscious Bob Crow was, there were limits to what he could achieve because of the nature of the period he lived through. The RMT under him did not gain the taking of the railways back into public ownership; it did not stop the “race to the bottom”  among seafarers or prevent large-scale redundancies in the oil industry. More generally, as a small, specialist union — even when working with other left-led unions — the RMT did not have the influence to persuade, as Crow wished, the wider union movement as a whole to stand up and fight neoliberalism and the age of austerity. His calls for resistance often fell on deaf ears.

If more union leaders had been like Crow in the period when he was alive, the situation for the Left would have been far better. But this would not have been enough to turn back the tide of neoliberalism and austerity. It is the combination of leaders and those who choose to follow them, namely, workers active in the pursuit of commonly agreed goals, that is vital. As he famously remarked, “spit on your own and you can’t do anything, but if we all spit together we can drown the bastards.” We can best honor his legacy by striving to create this collective combination.