Interview with two picketers on 21st June at Leytonstone station

It was a great picket at Leytonstone on the first day of the RMT strike. They welcomed us from the Waltham Forest Trade Union Council, and helped to fix up our banner, took photos and liked our All Strike Together placard.

The following is an interview with two of the picketers.

Question 1: Getting to this stage of a national strike across 13 companies has been a huge effort by RMT, and you have raised the hopes of many workers too. What do you think the union should do next?
Answer: I think we need a general strike. 100%. Every union. The whole lot.
The Tories got a clear agenda to bust the unions. No doubt about that. They don’t want to negotiate. TUC should call action.

Question 2: The Tories are threatening to introduce legislation to allow agency workers to replace strikers. How do you think the union should react to that?
Answer: Well, we’re not surprised. We’ve had anti-union laws for a long time ever since the other lot of Tories were in. We’ve got them beat on the balloting. We can beat them on this scabbing.
We don’t think it will work. Agency workers would have to be trained in safety and that’s expensive. What passengers would want to travel on unsafe trains?
The first thing we gotta do is get all unions to call a strike so we are all out together. We got a bit of a problem with TUC at the moment. They seem a bit weak to me. Tories are bad, but Labour is no better really. It’s disgusting what they said about not coming to support us on picket lines. Starmer is just a red Tory. But there’s no better time to call action. Workers are SO fed up there would be a good response.

We got a real fight on our hands.