Rail unions call for removal of profit motive

Britain’s trade union movement has called on the Labour government to expand publicly-owned freight operations and end the “profiteering” of rolling stock ownership companies.

At the annual meeting of the Trades Union Congress in Brighton on September 9, rail unions RMT and ASLEF warned that “vested interests” were “seeking to dilute and delay” Labour’s plan to take rail operations into public ownership.

A composite motion put forward by the two unions called for Great British Railways to be expanded to “absorb” open access operations and rail freight — both parts of the sector that Labour has said it will leave in private hands.

ASLEF, which earlier this year called for the establishment of a separate Scottish freight company, said competition between different freight operators had led to a “race to the bottom” that had resulted in redundancies. The motion called for a “statutory duty on GBR to promote the use of rail freight”, and “the expansion of publicly owned rail freight services eventually resulting in a fully renationalised rail freight sector”.

RMT general secretary Mick Lynch said: “We want to see the profit motive taken out of transport, particularly in the rail freight sector, and the rolling stock leasing companies dealt with.

"Outsourcing is a scourge on our transport network and the companies involved in this super exploitation must be removed from our industry.”

The TUC Congress was dominated by discussions of pay settlements following the Labour government’s proposals to resolve long-running disputes — including on the railways. ASLEF delegate Gary Boyle told the hall: “The media also quoted rail workers’ pay in comparison to NHS pay, trying to pit us against each other. But we won’t be pitted against each other. It’s time to tell our own story. We will be allied — it’s not a race to the bottom.”