On July 22nd Jimmy Kelly of Unite announced with an air of vindication that the decision to cancel the strike on May 6th had paid off and that following the union’s meeting with Danny Kennedy at Stormont, Translink and the NITHC had opened their books to provide information on the company’s “running costs”. As a result Unite had “brought forward a range of proposals for off-setting efficiencies which would safeguard bus and rail services and meet the £7 million shortfall to the public transport subvention.” This has in turn led to the DRD “allowing” Unite and Translink to co-operate in delivering “efficiencies”.

However, the May 6th strike had been forced on the leadership by public sector workers’ anger and was originally planned as a continuation of the March 13th strike. That anger had been directed at the Stormont House deal that threatened 20,000 jobs across the entire public sector, not just in Translink, but the trade union bureaucrats had quickly realised that any refusal to agree to the deal meant that the institutions at Stormont faced the threat of closure. Sammy Wilson has recently repeated the warning that no deal on welfare reform could mean an end to Stormont itself.

This presented the ICTU with a problem in that they had invested everything in cosying up to the institutions of the peace process, seeing their role as that of lobbyists, and opposition to its reactionary economic measures meant the danger of bringing the entire reactionary project down. Such a scenario is impossible from their point of view.

The union most affected was Unite, not because they were to suffer disproportionately from the cuts but because their members in public transport raised strong opposition to the Stormont House deal and vociferously demanded that the Unite leadership fight back against the austerity plans. Stormont’s austerity plans were the target, unsurprisingly, as that was after all the way in which the problem had previously been presented by NIC-ICTU itself.

Unite, having came under the most acute pressure to act, promised further industrial action to its agitated branches but with the passage of time the leadership, unable to face the implications of confronting Stormont, found the solution. By reinterpreting the aims and objectives of the planned May 6th strike simply as opposition to a threat to frontline staff at Translink, rather than as a general threat to the wider public services, they have narrowly focused on the £7m budget cuts in the current financial year forgetting the threatened £15m in cuts planned for the following year and the broader struggle against the Stormont House 

Deal

Unite’s leaders now are proudly announcing that they are involved in a common project with the management in implementing these cuts, because they are still cuts, no matter who they directly effect, and they present as a great victory that “previously planned cuts to bus and rail services will no longer be necessary” with the dubious caveat attached that “some routes” will still be effected and of course all mention of the overdue cost of living increase has sank without a trace.

Davy McMurray, a Unite official, has announced that the cuts will effect only management and therefore has invited the world to believe that the management of Translink have been rolled over, in the space of approximately one month, with no struggle, and agreed that the entire management structure will bear the loss and no redundancies will affect the front line staff. A remarkable achievement given that the management is involved in a “common project” with Unite to identify those “efficiencies”!

The policy background

When looked at a little closer the longer term plan is for the streamlining and ultimate privatisation of Translink’s most profitable routes, these fears were voiced by a Unite official in response to the original announcement of budget cuts in February when he stated that he believed; “I think it means they're getting ready to privatise Translink through the back door”.

In this statement he is undoubtedly correct. It is in line with the waves of privatisations of public utilities throughout Britain, Ireland and Europe, in public transport, health, education, and postal services, to name but a few. The latest Irish examples are the farming out of Dublin’s bus routes and plans to sell off Irish Water.  Plans are also well under way to “open up the rail market to privatisation” through the European Commission’s proposed “Fourth Railway Package” which demands a single European rail area that is open to competition. Translink’s NIR, having received exceptionally heavy investment has long been in preparation for privatisation and is currently earmarked for another £42m, and more if required, to upgrade the Derry line.

Preparations for Translink’s privatisation should not come as a surprise to any trade union official, especially as those preparations can be traced back to the production of a well-known report in 2010 by consultants McClure Watters highlighting problems with the top heavy management structures and what they saw as ‘overpaid’ workers. Undoubtedly unattractive to potential investors.

More recently a report published by the Comptroller and Auditor General in April echoes the McClure Watters findings. It spells out the necessity of restructuring but while rates of pay are considered high it is the unfavourable ratio of managers to frontline workers that is central. It reports that Translink “lay at the lower end of the range on turnover per employee [and] wage cost per employee …” but the main focus was on the operational staff to management ratio. It reports that; “operating staff to management staff ratios, … indicates that Metro and Ulsterbus have higher management overheads than other comparator public transport companies”.

The Comptroller and Auditer General’s report recommends that “Translink undertakes a more in-depth examination of comparative management/staff ratios which looks at the detail of the tasks performed elsewhere in order to compare the relative effectiveness and quality of the outputs delivered.”

The ‘main problems’, also identified previously by potential investors and CEO’s recruited from the private sector, was an outdated fleet and a huge managerial bureaucracy. The former of which has been largely rectified by large scale public investment, so to that extent the bloated management stood as a blockage to plans to privatise Translink. This is now in the process of being ‘rectified’ by the DRD as part of the process of bringing Translink in to line with the comparators used in the study, the bulk of which were private bus and rail companies such as Firstbus and Stagecoach. The Auditer General’s report makes it clear that the findings are already being acted upon, it states; “The Department [DRD] told us that it has already taken steps to ensure that Translink examines and addresses some of the poorer performing indicators.”

Inferring that these changes to management staffing levels was a coup for Unite is deliberately misleading. The plans to restructure Translink’s management was already under way at the insistence of the DRD and were at an advanced stage. They were the result of the report into the provision of public transport by the Comptroller and Auditor General and before that by the McClure Watters report, not as the sudden and remarkable result of Unite’s negotiations. So Unite’s announcement must convince us that either they did not know about these reports and the DRD’s plans and they were duped in to cancelling their strike during negotiations, or alternatively that they did know, which means they were willing to use the conditions being imposed at the DRD’s insistence as an easy excuse to cancel industrial action. The latter is the more plausible.

The deceit

At the bottom of the deceit is the Stormont House deal. The process began with the ICTU leadership’s verbal opposition to the deal’s austerity plans and Unite’s rhetorical promise not to “stand idly by”. The fantastic response from rank and file public sector workers on March 13th put pressure on them to deliver on their rhetoric but ICTU and Unite have consistently been trying to back out of a confrontation with Stormont ever since, shown by the total lack of effort or preparation for the strike planned for April 6th.

The presentation of these changes to Translink’s management structures as a victory for bus workers has provided Unite with a way out and allows them apparent justification for cancelling a strike they never wanted to organise in the first place. Irrespective of the fact that this phase of cuts predominately effects management structures the effect on “some routes” is vague and unquantified and is only a prelude to a deeper “restructuring”. The Stormont House austerity plans still stand.

The threat to thousands of public sector workers still exists and, looked at even from the narrow perspective of Unite’s sectionalist approach, within Translink that takes the form of longer term wage reductions and operational staff reductions by natural wastage and the release of staff on short term contracts, not to mention more redundancies in the next tranche of cuts next year. This means the inexorable decline in services to communities as the entire service is prepared for the same fate as Dublin Bus, the privatisation of the plum services. Heaped on top of that is the looming threat to the railways.