Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today projects a powerful image as a working-class warrior.

Mick Lynch is leader of the UK's biggest rail workers union, the RMT.

His band of brothers is some 80,000 strong, and his battleground is Britain's railway network, which for the past

eight months has been hit by a series of rolling strikes aimed at winning the railworkers,

an inflation-proofed pay rise, and a reprieve from job cuts and sweeping changes to working

conditions.

Lynch makes no apology for his confrontational approach.

He grew up in a poor London neighbourhood, got blacklisted for his union activities on building sites, and ended up on the railways where his commitment and passion as a union man

saw him elected to the top job in 2021.

The RMT has long been a stronghold of the far left.

Lynch has given it a charismatic public face.

The current industrial dispute on Britain's railways is part of a much wider picture of labour unrest,

with inflation high in much of the world and employers

keen to maximise efficiency by replacing humans with technology wherever possible, we have entered

a new era of struggle between employers and workers. The stakes are high. Can the workers

win? Well, Mick Lynch joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

You are the leader of a union that's been in a long-running dispute now.

It goes back to last summer. They've been rolling sporadic strikes.

As it goes on, does it feel harder to find your way to a compromise?

Well, there's no easy way out for either side.

The government has boxed themselves into a corner to a large extent.

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