SARAH CUNDY has three priorities for her year as chair of transport union RMT’s young members’ committee.

“The first is organising industrially — encouraging young members to become reps and become active in their workplace. We have a campaign on that regarding health and safety reps in particular because there aren’t many young safety reps — we could be facing a mass exodus of health and safety reps in the next 5-10 years because of the demographics. We’ve had some wins on that, we’ve gone from having about 50 young [under 35] health and safety reps nationally to about 80.

“Second, education. We run various education programmes throughout the year. We’ve got one in a couple of months at the AGM in Hull, we try to do a mini-day course at the Durham Miners’ Gala and we have a course with the Marx Memorial Library on political economy. We’re trying to bring back the young women’s course as well. Education provides young activists with better means of organising and political understanding.

“And third, campaigns. I mentioned the health and safety rep campaign, we have another on organising apprentices because often they don’t quite fit into the rep structures, and we can face issues with other unions offering very low rates for apprentices who we then don’t get till they join the workplace fully. Yet apprentices usually have worse terms, conditions and pay.”

Cundy is a gateline assistant at Manchester Piccadilly station and has been in RMT since she first joined the railway in 2021.

Rail’s seen as a well organised sector with good terms and conditions, but this isn’t always the case: “I was working at a relatively new rail company in Britain so we didn’t have a lot of the good terms and conditions or pay that other train operators had, because there wasn’t a long history of trade union organising with that employer.

“So it was a battle from day one to start winning better pay and conditions on that line. That got me really involved, and from there I got involved in the youth structures.

“Particularly in newer operators or open-access operators [who run services on routes without being the main franchisee] they’re trying to implement retail-style management and, I think, hiring a lot of younger people on purpose from retail backgrounds or backgrounds that aren’t well unionised.

“Expecting that we’ll be happy to be micromanaged in the same way you are in those industries, accept worse pay and so on. In my first job the company did hire a lot of young people — people they presumed lived with their parents as well, so they could pay them less.

“One of the issues that faces young people is we need to be proud of the heritage built on the railway — defend the terms and conditions won over many, many years when new operators come on the scene who don’t respect them.”

She’s had her baptism of fire, given the RMT’s national rail dispute of 2022-23: “I was involved as most RMT members were in the national dispute, so I’ve been on strike. And I’ve recently been elected a rep in my workplace.”

RMT is a bogeyman for the capitalist press, one of the media’s favourite targets when demonising striking workers for disrupting people’s commutes and holidays. But the mood was different in the strike wave.

“We got more popular support, in the press there was the usual hostility, but among the public people had seen Mick [Lynch, the general secretary] or [assistant general secretary] Eddie [Dempsey] on TV, and they were linking our struggle with problems they faced as well.

“I think we inspired a lot of the other strikes that then took place across different industries.”

Public support beyond the union’s own membership would prove crucial to last year’s Save Our Ticket Offices campaign.

One of the most successful union-led public campaigns for years, it mobilised such a public backlash to ministers’ plans to shut every ticket office in England that they were entirely scrapped.

“I think the train operators were shocked at the level of public mobilisation. They assumed people don’t use ticket offices.

“But for a lot of people it represented more than just ‘do you buy a ticket from a person or a machine.’ People realised that in a lot of smaller stations the ticket office member of staff might be the only member of staff on the station, and if you have a crisis in that station then what do you do?

“We had a lot of mobilisation from women’s groups and from disabled groups. If you need help at the station, who is going to provide it? You need staff.

“At Manchester Piccadilly we had 10,20 people leafleting all day every day for the whole campaign. Within the union you saw people who don’t normally attend branch meetings, wouldn’t normally be activists getting involved.”

She sees the constant pressure to remove staff as part of the managed decline of Britain’s railway, since “historically a lot of young people would get a foot in the door of the railway in roles that are being eliminated — so station staff are being cut, dispatchers are removed by driver-only operation. It makes it harder for young people to get into the industry because the historic entry-level jobs are being taken away.”

Britain’s government doesn’t seem interested in investing in the railway, in contrast to continental European countries such as Germany or Spain which are adopting incentives to get more people out of cars and onto trains — the unlimited travel monthly ticket being a flagship policy — to reduce emissions. 

Cundy says things will improve with nationalisation under Labour, noting that with the current fragmented system you can have staff “doing exactly the same job, at the same gate, being paid £5-10,000 more or less” than each other. But she cautions it will “depend on the extent to which Labour bows down to the lobbyists.” 

A proper plan for public transport is essential to any green transition, she notes; and “Labour should be the voice of trade unions in Parliament.” 

Cundy is a committed socialist, active in Labour when at university and recently returned from a trade union delegation to Cuba — “it was great, this beautiful country, but also to see a completely different way of structuring an economy.” 

She flags that RMT is bringing back its annual Cuba Garden Party next month — it’s on June 12 — and sees that as part of the union’s deep-rooted internationalism, also expressed in its vocal solidarity with Palestine amid the current Israeli onslaught. Cundy met Palestinian trade unionists at a conference in Jordan last year. 

“We’re the only trade union in Britain that’s in both the ITUC [International Trade Union Confederation] and the [traditionally more explicitly socialist] World Federation of Trade Unions. We have links with trade unionists in every country.”

She’s enthusiastic about her union, but could anything be improved? 

“It’s really important to me that the youth section continues to be a really welcoming and inclusive space. We had a really positive conference in Wigan this year. The environment at the union’s conferences isn’t always so collaborative!

“We’re trying to build through the young members section a space where we are supportive of each other, encouraging young people to get involved in campaigning, organising and becoming reps, supporting each other in our common struggle against the employer.”