National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT)

By Rosemary Harris, Gabrielle Jeliazkov, and Ryan Morrison - Our Power, March 6, 2023

Over the past two years, we’ve come together with offshore workers to build demands for a just energy transition. These workers developed 10 demands covering training and skills, pay, job creation, investment and public ownership.

We surveyed over 1000 additional offshore workers and over 90% agreed with these demands. This plan is comprehensive in scope, transformative in scale and deliverable now.

Below you will find a series of resources setting out the demands and the paths we can take to turn them into reality.

We need a rapid transition away from oil and gas that protects workers, communities and the climate. But the government has no plan to phase out oil and gas production in the North Sea.

Oil and gas workers are ready to lead a just transition away from oil and gas, but they are caught in a trap of exploitation and fear created by oil and gas companies. Working conditions are plummeting, just as profits, prices and temperatures are soaring.

The UK and Scottish Governments must listen to workers to make this transition work for all of us. These demands lay out a comprehensive plan, which includes:

• Removing barriers that make it harder for oil and gas workers to move into the renewable industry.
• Ensuring safety, job security and fair pay across the energy industry.
• Sharing the benefits of our energy system fairly, with public investment in energy companies and communities.

Workers have told us what they need for a just transition, now we need to work with them to make it happen.

Read the report (PDF).

By Chris Saltmarsh - The Ecologist, February 6, 2023

A review of Derailed: How to Fix Britain’s Railways, by Tom Haines-Doran, published by Manchester University Press.

As climate change intensifies, the imperative to shift our transport system away from polluting private cars to public transport – rail in particular – becomes increasingly urgent.

At the same time, amid an inflationary crisis, rail workers are at the forefront of a nationwide wave of strike action defending pay and conditions.

In Derailed: How to Fix Britain’s Broken Railways, Tom Haines-Doran puts the UK’s rail system in these political-economic contexts with a compelling account of its history, present conditions and future possibilities.

By Marcus Barnett - Labor Notes, November 18, 2022

In Britain today, anyone asking a worker about the direction the country is headed will be unlikely to receive a printable answer.

Stumbling from crisis to crisis, the country is on its third prime minister of the year. Energy bills have skyrocketed by 96 percent since last winter, and rent has shot up by as much as 20 percent, while inflation—which currently stands at 12.3 percent—has been predicted to rise as high as 18 percent by the first few months of 2023.

This is happening in a country which was the first in Western Europe to register 200,000 deaths from the coronavirus and has already been subject to brutal austerity measures that have wrecked the social fabric. An analysis by the Trades Unions Congress (TUC, the British equivalent of the AFL-CIO) released earlier this year found that British workers earned £60 ($70) less per month in real wages in 2021 than at the start of the financial crisis in 2008—the longest wage slump since the Napoleonic Era.

Where employers have offered any wage increases to combat inflation, they have still represented significant pay cuts in real terms. Not that the same rules apply to them; while pay offers to workers have generally veered between 2 and 6 percent, the average pay of an FTSE 100 chief executive shot up 23 percent this year, with record bonuses being dished out. (The FTSE 100 is made up of the largest companies on the London Stock Exchange).

One such recipient was Philip Jansen, the CEO of BT Group, Britain’s largest provider of internet and phone services. BT reported £1.3 billion in profits this year, while Jansen netted a £3.5 million pay package—a 32 percent increase. He now makes 86 times more than the average BT employee.

Yet after six brief meetings with representatives of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), Jansen called off discussions and unilaterally imposed an insulting £1,500 ($1,770) increase to annual base salaries—which amounts to a pay cut in real terms for the company’s 40,000 call center workers and field technicians. The call center workforce is paid so poorly that some have become increasingly reliant on workplace food banks.

Another was Simon Thompson, CEO of Royal Mail Group, the UK postal service (which was privatized a decade ago under the Conservative-Liberal coalition government). In June, Thompson—who earns £62,750 a month—awarded himself a “short-term” bonus of £142,000. Shortly afterwards, the company informed its 115,000 workers it would be unilaterally raising wages by just 2 percent—a drastic pay cut in the context of the country’s cost-of-living crisis. That’s despite Royal Mail workers generating record annual profits of £758 million for the company.

By Tahir Latif - Greener Jobs Alliance, October 16, 2022

On 8th October, our colleagues in Campaign Against Climate Change held a day’s conference titled ‘Urgent action, long term solutions: cost of living, climate and industrial action’. One of the sessions, for which I was Chair, had the title ‘Winning climate arguments in trade unions’ and included excellent contributions from Sam Mason (PCS and Trade Unions for Energy Democracy), Mel Mullings (RMT) and Suzanne Jeffery (Chair, CACCTU).

There was also a great contribution from Pablo John, a GMB worker and a member of GMB for a Green New Deal, and Pablo has written a follow-up piece that appears alongside this article as part of the debate thread we hope to initiate around trade union policy and climate.

At such a critical moment for the country we desperately need a sensible, well-thought-out debate about how trade unions deal with the climate crisis and serve the long-term interest of their members. That means recognising first that what many GJA supporters will see as a worrying trend towards regressive policies (support for fracking, oil and gas drilling, more nuclear) is a response to the fact that we have a government that is promoting those very industries and therefore that’s where the jobs would be.

My own counter to that would be that, as climate catastrophe approaches, those industries become increasingly untenable and our energy strategy will have to change and change more abruptly and dramatically the longer we leave it. But it is difficult to sustain that argument when union leaders only have to look around to see that their members’ current jobs are ‘real’ while the point I’ve just made is ‘notional’. The ask of those trade unions would be, even while supporting ‘regressive’ policies, at least come to the table to talk about the future, and what the workforce will look like, or else when the catastrophe strikes, as everyone knows it will, the change will be done to you not by you.

By Jen Bell and Guy Ingerson - Bright Green, October 9, 2022

The impacts of climate breakdown are becoming more apparent every year. In the last few months alone we have witnessed heatwaves, drought, and floods. These extreme weather events have devastated communities, directly in places such as Pakistan, and indirectly closer to home, with rising food prices. Bold action is needed for our species to survive and thrive beyond this century.

We know what needs to be done, but too often vested interests seek to delay or subvert the action required. If we allow politicians, focused on their own ambitions, and corporations, concerned only with their profits, to control the transition, we’ll end up with more of the same. Luckily, Greens have an ally on our journey: the trade union movement. If we’re serious about achieving social justice for all, we need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the workers who’ve been fighting for it.

For over 150 years, trade unionists have known that corporations and bosses don’t care one bit about the value of our lives or our environment. We’re all just numbers on a balance sheet to them. But when we organise, or withdraw our labour, we smack them upside the head with reality. As RMT’s senior assistant general secretary, Eddie Dempsey, said: “There isn’t a train that moves in this country, not a bin gets emptied, or a shelf that gets stacked without the kind, generous permission of the working class.”

Whether it be a living wage, health and safety regulations, limits on working hours, paid holidays, parental leave, and much more – trade unionists have written the text book on how to fight for the core Green values of social, economic and environmental justice. They understand that our lives and our work should have value and dignity.

By Matthew Hull - Bright Green, October 5, 2022

It has become commonplace to refer to 2022 as a turning point for organised labour. The year is not out, but already it is being referred to as a year of strikes and industrial action.

This is all relative. Strike days are up from a low base, with 2018 marking a 125-year low watermark in the number of work days lost to strike action. When published this year’s figures will surely be dwarfed by the previous peak of 27.1 million in 1984.

Nevertheless, we are seeing a marked and welcome change in perspective and a renewed appreciation of the importance of worker action to defending social progress.

As we press deeper into autumn, however, we face the growing risk of 2022 becoming another, darker turning point for the UK’s trade union movement.

The prime minister Liz Truss was selected by a tiny, overwhelmingly older and wealthier Tory Party membership largely on the basis of her commitment to tear up people’s rights and freedoms. And the rights of trade unionists to organise, campaign and strike freely and effectively are in the firing line.

By Helen Wilkie - Birkenhead News, September 26, 2022

On Saturday (24 September) workers at the Ørsted site in Kings Wharf, Birkenhead, completed the first of two 48-hour strikes over a 3.5% pay offer from the Danish company, which in April this year reported profits of £664 million.

The riverfront site employs 19 highly skilled technicians, all of whom completed their apprenticeships locally or with the armed forces. Two crew boats, Braver and Boarder sail from Seacombe to the Burbo Bank wind farms every day to ensure the turbines are maintained and remain operational.

In addition to the pay dispute, the 96 nationwide RMT members are unhappy that management walked away from talks to sign a collective bargaining agreement at the last minute, and instead entered into an agreement with a different union with no workplace presence.

In a separate trade dispute with Ørsted Energy, RMT members have also voted overwhelmingly for industrial action over the victimisation of a fellow worker at the Barrow in Furness site.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said, “The obscene profits being made at Orsted show that this dispute could be settled if the company sat down with the union and negotiated in good faith. 

“Instead, they are trying to shut out the RMT and our members will not stand for it.

“Orsted workers take pride in the vital work they do but they will not be made poorer by a company that could give them a cost of living pay rise tomorrow.”

A second round of strike action will commence on Friday 30 September.

Ørsted have been approached for comment.

By staff - Just Transition Partnership, August 18, 2022

The Just Transition Partnership sends solidarity to RMT, TSSA and ASLEF members taking industrial action to protect their pay, jobs and working conditions, and in the wider fight for a sustainable public transport system run for people and the planet, not private greed. Billions are being cut from our transport system at a time when increasing investment is vital to ensure a fully public, affordable, integrated and sustainable transport system.

Our railways are already being impacted by the effects of climate change, putting additional demands on a stretched workforce providing an essential public service. We need a well-paid transport workforce with secure conditions and it is indefensible to expect transport and other workers to take an effective pay cut as inflation and the costs of energy rise, especially while the profits of oil companies soar.

The UK government is failing on the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis. It has no integrated transport plans, favouring private companies which make vast profits rather than making transport affordable and our air breathable; in Scotland as well as the rest of the UK train and bus services are being cut. These actions are symptomatic of disregard for the concerns of climate, environment and workers.

The solutions to these crises have the same foundations – public investment into decarbonised and high-quality services using both taxation and legal duties on private companies; all delivered by a well-paid, skilled and secure workforce. These things won’t happen without workers in their trade unions organising to defend their wages, their jobs, their future and their rights through the power of collective bargaining. The workers movement and the climate justice movement need to build our collective power if we are to defend our future, that is why we send our solidarity to the workers on strike.

By Mick Lynch - Doble Down News, August 4, 2022