'If I have a strike and nobody knows it’s happened and it’s had no effect whatsoever, I’m wasting my members’’ time'
The General Secretary of the RMT has once more made journalists from the corporate media look utterly clueless, as he defended the latest round of strike action over the weekend.
While members of the ASLEF union took strike action on Saturday 3rd June, the day Manchester United and Manchester City met at Wembley for the FA cup final, the RMT took strike action the day before the final, which involved 20,000 catering, station staff and train managers working for 14 companies.
The RMT’s Mick Lynch carried out a number of interviews on Friday in relation to the strikes and dismantled the arguments thrown at him with his typically cool responses.
He was accused, along with union colleagues, of deliberately targeting the weekend of the FA Cup Final and of ruining people’s weekends who were travelling for a number of reasons.
Lynch was told on Sky News: “People are going to be travelling all around the country this weekend for a number of huge events, the FA Cup final, there’s a Beyoncé concert in London and you’re going to be ruining their weekend by your guys being out on strike”.
Lynch replied: “We’ll that’s not what we seek to do, we’re trying to defend our people, defend their standard of living and defend their jobs, we don’t want to ruin people attending Beyoncé or the FA cup or anything else.
“Last year, the railways decided to close the entire West Coast service, one which most people will use on Cup Final day. So they don’t care about football fans or pop fans, they don’t care about anything apart from propping up the private sector operators on the railways.”
Lynch was also asked on the BBC Newscast why there wasn’t a groundswell of public support for the rail strikes, to which he replied: “There is now groundswell. All opinion polls show that the people want publicly-owned railways.”
On accusations that the RMT were deliberately ruining people’s travel plans he said: “There’s no good day to have an event when people were commuting, people said we were targeting the commuter, when we do weekends they say we’re targeting leisure, I don’t have a whiteboard in my office saying let’s hit these people at the Chelsea Flower show or whatever’s going on.”
He went on to add: “If I have a strike and nobody knows it’s happened and it’s had no effect whatsoever, I’m wasting my members’’ time, so any railway strike will be disruptive.”
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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