Support RMT strikers – sack greedy SERCO bosses

Text of a Socialist Party Scotland leaflet

Socialist Party Scotland gives our 100% support and solidarity to RMT members taking strike action on the Caledonian Sleeper services.

The refusal of SERCO bosses to take part in genuine talks over the RMT’s demands says it all. They care about profit, not the health and safety of staff or passengers. It’s long past time that SERCO, and all the privateers running the railways, were nationalised under democratic workers’ control.

As the RMT has rightly said: “The strike action has been sparked after SERCO Caledonian Sleeper continued to provide insufficient berths for rest periods and the company’s inability to address the fatigue experienced by RMT members as a result.

“RMT says that safety on the railway is paramount and the company are showing a clear lack of regard for the welfare of its staff. There is no question that RMT members are essential for the safe running of the railway and it is vital that staff are able to carry out their duties responsively and quickly. This can only happen when staff are free from the danger of fatigue.”

There is no doubt SERCO’s refusal to provide sleeper berths for staff is a cost-cutting measure. They are trying to squeeze every penny of profit from the almost £800 million contract they have to provide Scotland to London sleeper services for the next 15 years.

And they have form for this. SERCO’s reputation stinks when it comes to delivering what should be public services for profit. Scandalously the SNP-led Scottish government handed the NORTHLINK Orkney and Shetland ferry contract to SERCO in 2019. That’s a contract worth up to £600 million. SERCO should be no where near any of these vital services.

The RMT deserves the full support of all workers and the entire trade union movement. At a time when many union leaders, including the tops of the TUC and the STUC, are claiming unions have a “national interest” with governments and bosses in the time of Covid, workers’ action like the RMT strike shows this is a lie.

Greedy bosses are taking advantage of the pandemic to slash jobs, wages and attack workers’ terms and conditions. The trade union movement has a responsibility to build coordinated industrial action to demand that workers don’t pay for the Covid crisis.

With both the leaders of the Labour Party and the SNP preaching from the same hymn book as big business, workers need their own party. Socialist Party Scotland calls for the trade unions to build a new mass workers’ party. We work with the RMT as part of Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition

Who are SERCO?

• SERCO boss Rupert Soames is the brother of former Tory MP Nicholas Soames and grandson of the late Tory PM Winston Churchill.
• SERCO recently accidentally shared the contact details of 300 contact tracers, in breach of its own data protocols.
• Last year it was fined almost £23 million in a settlement with the Serious Fraud Office over reportedly overcharging the government for offenders’ electronic tagging.
• In 2018, SERCO’s breast-cancer screening hotline in England failed to issue 450,000 women invitations to attend important screenings. It emerged that the hotline was being run by call handlers with only one hour’s training.
• Also that year, SERCO planned to evict hundreds of asylum seekers from private accommodation in Glasgow without court orders.
• In the summer of 2017, low-paid workers in Barts NHS Trust (members of Unite union, including Socialist Party members), employed by SERCO, were engaged in months of bitter strike action to secure the London Living Wage.
• SERCO has its fingers in many government contract pies, including running six prisons and an immigration removal centre, Covid-19 Track and Trace and rail and ferry services
• SERCO posted revenues of £2.8 billion in 2018, and an underlying profit of £93.1 million.

Standing for workers in 2021

In 2010 Bob Crow, the then general secretary of the RMT, alongside the Socialist Party, created the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).

TUSC was formed to offer trade unionists and working-class people a genuine 100% anti-austerity alternative in elections. Since 2010, TUSC has stood hundreds of candidates in Westminster, Holyrood and local council elections.

Our policy platform is committed to opposing all cuts, for public ownership and for the abolition of all anti-union laws. We also support the right to a second indyref and we fight for an independent socialist Scotland.

Scottish TUSC – which involves the RMT, Socialist Party Scotland and many leading Scottish trade unionists is currently preparing to stand in the Scottish parliament elections in May 2021.

On Saturday November 7, Scottish TUSC is holding a conference open to all trade unionists and socialists who want to build a fighting alternative to the parties of cuts in the May 2021 election. The conference will take place on Zoom at 1pm.
www.tusc.org.uk – Facebook: Scottish TUSC