22.11.2001

Teesside

Stagecoach robbery

AEEU and TGWU members who work for the Stagecoach company on Teesside have been locked in combat for several weeks now in a dispute largely over pay.

Since the deregulation of local bus services in the Jurassic era of Thatcher?s Conservative government, local bus services across the country have seen the free market do its damnedest. However, whereas the privatisation of the railways has attracted national headlines, the appalling services suffered by users of a different form of transport have not been such hot news. And, although bus companies retain relatively high levels of union organisation, the workers have over recent years not been renowned for their militancy.

Bus companies across the country, previously split into countless concerns, have seen numerous mergers and takeovers that have left just a few main players, Stagecoach certainly being one of them. But the return to local pay and conditions in a period of low combativity has reduced the workforce to almost Dickensian boss-worker relations. Workers in Newcastle have received higher wages than those employed by the same company on Teesside: an hourly rate of just over ?5 per hour has been all that Teesside drivers have been paid.

Company excuses have been met, however, with action. Claims for an increase across the board to bring the wages of all drivers into line with the highest paid for the company has surely been the right tactic. Two days of solid strike action has seen management drafted in from across the north to keep a slender pretence of a service going on strike days.

Solid and defiant picket lines, clearly disregarding anti-trade union legislation, alongside flexible campaigning initiatives, including the leafleting of bus-users and people in the town centres, have given the workers a taste of their own ability to take on the employer and win. As the Weekly Worker goes to press, strike action has been suspended pending a ballot on an increased offer - clearly a victory for Stagecoach workers across Teesside.

Quoting from a leaflet supporting the strikers, the local Socialist Alliance has pledged to put itself at the disposal of the strikers. Invitations from SA members on the trades council for strikers to put across their case and organise supportive action were welcomed.

Links made with stewards from the AEEU and TGWU will hopefully lead to creating a network of trade union activists organised in the Socialist Alliance. Plans to build on the Unions Fightback conference are already underway and hopefully Stagecoach workers will show support for other groups of workers - eg, civil servants and care centre workers - as they move into dispute in the north east. There is certainly a feeling that people will not be pushed around for much longer.

Socialist Alliance comrades need to put themselves at the centre of working class resistance and help develop rank and file campaigning initiatives, wherever the opportunities present themselves.

Lawrie Coombs