Prices are rising. Wages are falling. Profits are soaring. Will this be our future, or will we

choose a different one? Workers have started to fight back. Welcome to Tisky Sour. I'm Barnaby Rain,

standing in for Michael Walker, and I'm delighted to be joined by Moyer Lothian McLean. Moyer,

it's great to have you. Thank you. I think we've got a lot to talk about today. It's an

excited to crack on with the show. This week 40,000 RMT members have gone on strike. They're not

asking for a real-terms pay rise. They just want to avoid their third year of real-terms pay cuts

as inflation soars, and they want to save over 2,000 jobs at risk of redundancy. Now, inflation

and strikes may remind some people of the 1970s that last crisis was resolved in the interests of

capital, not workers, and we got five decades of growing inequality, increasing precarity,

climate devastation, and a financial crash, and even talk of class struggles virtually disappeared.

Well, now they're back, as transport workers launch their biggest strike in 30 years. This time,

though, it doesn't have to end the same way. Earlier, I spoke with RMT Assistant General Secretary

Eddie Dempsey. I began by asking him to tell us about the background to this current strike.

And seeing people in the industry from the employer side were saying to me,

that if the government doesn't step in and give us money, then we are going to go bust,

and we don't know if we can pay wages. So what that subsidy was was in effect a bailout for private

companies much like what happened during 2008 when the government stepped in and bowed out all

kinds of bankers and speculators. They did that with these private companies and millions and

billions of that money went through our industry and left this country in the form of private profits,

and a lot of it went off to tax havens in Guernsey and in the Cayman Islands and elsewhere.

We've got companies that are called rolling stock leasing companies. You don't hear about these

often, but these are companies that sit in the background of the railway, are effectively

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