Echoes of Thatcher in UK railway battle

Rona Jeff loved her job as a PR consultant for an education charity in central London. But last month she quit. Her train commute had become so unbearable it was ruining her health.

“It became untenable to try to go to work,” said Jeff, whose journey into London from Brighton on England’s south coast should have taken just over an hour, but was regularly taking 4 1/2 hours because of cancellations, slow-downs and strikes. She rarely saw her husband, gave up a photography class, repeatedly cancelled plans with friends, missed a theatre performance after saving up for tickets. Finally, the stress was wrecking her sleep: “It got to the point where I was ill.”

Southern Rail, one of more than a dozen privatized railways that bring commuters into London, has seen 25 days of strikes over 10 months. Even when staff are not officially striking, workers have been calling in sick en masse and refusing overtime, causing trains to be cancelled and timetables cut. When trains do run, nearly 40 percent are late.

For a labour dispute on a railway with just 4,000 employees, the costs have been colossal. Hundreds of thousands of people are regularly affected. A university study last month estimated the dispute had so far cost the economy 300 million pounds.

Officially, the argument is over a seemingly small issue: who should open and close train doors. That task now sometimes falls to conductors who ride in train carriages; Southern says train drivers can do it themselves.

The unions say that would be dangerous. Management says it is the practice on other lines and deemed safe by regulators. It would mean trains could sometimes run without a guard on board, although the company says it has no plans to reduce staff and will keep “supervisors” on trains to help passengers. Despite the narrow issue, both sides accuse their opponents of having far bigger aims, turning it into the most consequential industrial action in Britain for decades.

Members of the ruling Conservative party say militant unions are deliberately fomenting commuter chaos for political reasons. Unions and the opposition Labour Party say the government is prolonging the feud to break the back of the labour movement.

And it could get worse. Unions are threatening more strikes against other railways. Conservative politicians are calling for changes to laws to make such strikes more difficult, or even ban them, a step which would be seen as a broad attack on labour.

Already the worst industrial dispute on Britain’s railways since privatisation, it lends Prime Minister Theresa May’s new tenure an echo of the era of her hero Margaret Thatcher, who transformed and polarised Britain by crushing its coal miners.

Since Thatcher left office in 1990, Britain has experienced nearly three decades of labour peace, with only a fraction of the thousands of days per year lost to strikes that were typical from the 1950s through the 1980s. —Reuters