Mick Lynch: the making of a working-class hero
Gregor Gall, Manchester University Press, £20

GREGOR GALL is Visiting Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Leeds and author of Bob Crow: socialist, leader, fighter (2017) among other books. This is a useful biography of Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers. It is also a study of the relationship between trade union struggles and the struggle for socialism.

It should be said at the start that the RMT did not authorise this book, as Gall acknowledges in an appendix: “On August 23 2022, Lynch was approached to be interviewed for the writing of this book... the response on September 2 was that ‘he is not interested in participating in this project’.”

This makes it pretty clear that the RMT did not want to be involved in this project, indeed that the project was carried out against the RMT’s wishes. 

In 2022, the government attacked the RMT rail membership’s terms and conditions of employment. It wanted to cut the subsidy it gave to Network Rail and the train operating companies (TOCs), so it wanted “savings” through productivity gains, which RMT rightly saw as meaning fewer workers doing longer hours for lower wages in worse conditions. So the union took action to defend its members’ jobs, pay and working conditions.

Before Christmas 2022, the government, via the Department for Transport, inserted an insistence on driver-only operated trains into TOCs’ proposals. This was against the TOCs’ wishes, but achieved the government’s intention to prevent a resolution of the dispute.

Across Britain, between June 2022 and May 2023, there were 3.93 million strike days, up from just 273,000 in 2018. Barristers and baristas, dockers and doctors, cleaners and carers, all took action against the “cost-of-living crisis.” 

But RMT was the first union to go into battle with its national strike action, and being the first put the RMT – and Mick Lynch – under the media spotlight, a role which he performed extremely well. The RMT’s high-profile struggle helped to encourage other workers to take action.

RMT succeeded in gaining an increase in the initial pay offer from Network Rail and the TOCs, from 2-3 per cent for 2022 to 9 per cent over two years. Gall criticises the RMT and its leadership for accepting this deal. 

It was not everything that the members had fought for, but we should consider it a victory when any dispute wrests from the employer more than it wanted to give. Rail workers showed exemplary tactical nous in knowing when to draw the line, to consolidate and prepare for the future. We can see how successful it was because the government is changing the law to make all such action illegal. The union also played a leading role in the great popular victory of keeping the ticket offices open.

Gall points out that the Conservative Spectator magazine tried to drive a wedge between workers and their elected leaders by claiming that union officials are “middle class” because they earn more than the national average wage. Gall seems to agree, even claiming that Lynch “was no longer working class materially, socially or politically.”

Gall argues that union officials are part of “the professional-managerial class, located in between the working and ruling classes,” and “neither capitalists nor workers.” But since they do not own the means of production, they make their living by selling their labour power. They do not exploit other people’s labour power.

Lynch continued the RMT’s fine tradition of defending Britain’s democracy and independence. He pointed out that “the European Union has privatisation embedded in its constitution... I don’t like the idea that you give your sovereignty and democracy away to a load of bureaucrats and bankers.” 

As he observed, now we are outside the EU and: “[Any] future government is free to make any legislative changes that it wants and can enhance what we do, and can indeed nationalise public sector services, which you cannot do inside the European Union.”

The European Union has the free movement of labour embedded in its constitution as well. As Lynch explained: “The free movement of labour I don’t think helps anyone because it means the countries that people are coming from have lost some of their most able people... and it didn’t help the labour market in Britain.”

He noted that: “In the Viking Laval case... Lithuanian workers were posted into Scandinavia [on] Lithuanian wages which obviously undermines the local [labour] market so there are problems [with] free movement of labour.” 

Gall calls him a left-wing social democrat, and notes that too many people “have continued to look skywards for representation and prosecution of their views and interests by others” — a pretty good definition of social democracy. 

Gall observes: “For Lynch, the point of extra-parliamentary campaigning was to pressurise Labour into action.” His view is that Lynch does not advocate that rail workers directly control their industry as part of working-class power over the whole economy. 

Lynch said on December 16 2022: “All of the wealth in our society is created by workers... What we need in this country, in all other countries, is a distribution of wealth so that those who do the work and create the wealth get a fair share of the fruits of their labour.” 

But this raises the question, how can workers get a “fair” share of the wealth when the capitalist class controls the means of production and therefore of distribution? We want to run the bakery, not just beg its current owners for a “fairer” share of the loaf we produce.

So, in all, the book has some value as a study of Mick Lynch and the RMT’s recent industrial action, but is flawed by the lack of direct involvement of those most involved in the RMT’s work, and principally, of course, of Lynch himself.