“The bishop of Durham was on a panel with me last week, saying: ‘I identify with the issues, but I don’t think strike action is the answer,’” Lynch says. The classic, convoluted centre-left position, held by Labour – that the demands are fair but strikes are bad – has come unstuck the same poll found that only 18% of people were opposed to railway workers’ right to strike. A poll during the strikes in June showed that 70% of the public supported the railway workers getting a pay rise that took into account the cost of living. The traditional attacks on striking transport workers – that they are out to stop hard-working people getting to work, that they are better-paid than you anyway – are failing to land. They tell us what to do.” People have been told that they should be grateful for having a job, grateful for earning a living It sounds a bit pompous, but the members are sovereign in this union. Which is completely the wrong way around: unions are very democratic. I can just move them about according to who I want to annoy that morning. They think that we are all these cliches that they perpetuate. They obviously don’t know what trade unions are. “The questions they ask are so …” He chooses his word carefully. “The state of journalism,” he says, shaking his head. (It is about whether railway workers will accept what the RMT says is a real-terms pay cut over the next two years, plus the loss of one‑third of frontline maintenance roles and half of scheduled maintenance work. Lynch’s detached, almost amused scorn spoke for many of us, not just about Piers Morgan, but also about how long we have been putting up with a media culture that means you can find 17 stories about the orphan/pensioner/dog who had their day ruined by a rail strike, but if you want a sober explanation of what the strike is about you will have more luck on TikTok. I can’t think of a time in my life when that has been the stereotype of a trade unionist.Ġ3:46 'Marxist or the Hood?': RMT's Mick Lynch asked bizarre questions amid rail strikes – video He also looks like a man in charge of the moment: relaxed, with an easy sense of humour. He is making the point that he hopes the RMT will be more diverse in the future. Lynch looks, in his own words, like “the personification of what an RMT general secretary is”: white, male, bald, 60. I meet him in the RMT’s boardroom, round the corner from Euston station in central London, where the RMT recently had 1,000 people turn up at very short notice, to support a picket line in the dispute between railway workers and Network Rail. Nonetheless, as the rail strikes in Britain enter their third month, he will concede that “a lot of people are telling me I’m doing good”. The leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), which represents 80,000 members, doesn’t like flattery. I t is rare, these days, for the general secretary of a trade union, let alone a small one, to become a national figure.
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