RMT union members on the London Underground are demanding Labour’s Mayor Sadiq Khan intervenes to protect their workmates, threatened with deportation.
Around 70 tube workers, who are responsible for safety in the stations, cleaning and passenger flow during London’s hectic rush hours, are reliant on employer-sponsored visas which cover jobs on the Temporary Shortage List.
But the Home Office recently downgraded their roles to ‘medium skilled’, meaning they will lose their visas, their jobs and their right to remain. In other words, some deskbound bureaucrat has determined 70 families’ futures with a click of a mouse.
While these sorts of decisions are made week in, week out, this time the state machinery has come up against the solid wall of one of Britain’s best organised workforces. The London Region of the RMT immediately launched a campaign to defend the migrant tube workers, many of whom are union members.
The union has threatened to escalate the campaign to strike action if the Migration Advisory Committee does not issue a specific exemption to the workers.
As the RMT says: ‘From the Irish who dominated the building of the first Tube lines to the post-Windrush generation who staffed the job when it was a much less desirable place to work, through to the current workforce on stations, trains, catering, cleaning and much more, migrant labour has been a significant contributor to running London.’
The same could be said of the NHS and council services, cleaners and security guards. The unions who organise these jobs and grades should follow the RMT’s example, and demand no worker is deported to satisfy Labour’s pandering to racist Reform voters.
We should not be asking for ‘specific exemptions’. We should be blowing a great big hole through the whole raft of immigration laws, which treat workers according to their ability to make sufficient profit for their bosses. If this campaign can be the start of such a movement, then it might not just save 70 workers from deportation but many, many more.
