RMT announces tube and rail strike
The RMT union has announced that members are to take parallel strike action on both the London Underground and mainline rail services.
There will be 24 hours worth of strikes next Tuesday (29th June) from 18:30BST onwards.
Strikes had originally be threatened for election day on 10th June but were called off at the last minute.
RMT leader Bob Crow said that the strike on the Tube has been called following the failure to agree terms and conditions with London Underground and Metronet.
They have rejected offers of a three per cent pay rise from London Underground.
“Despite our best efforts, talks with both LUL and Metronet have got us nowhere fast, and our members are now fed up with being messed around,” Mr Crow said.
“We have bent over backwards to keep talks going and to leave the door open to a long-term deal, but the employers appear not to be taking the talks seriously at all.
“We want a date for the implementation of a 35-hour week and a date for the start of a four-day week, and we want serious progress on pay.
“We will not accept the destruction of hard-won working conditions, and we will not accept the creation of a two tier workforce.”
Alistair Darling, the Transport Minister, said the industrial action was “totally unnecessary.”
“At a time when improvements are starting to come through on the Tube and trains the last thing passengers need is a strike.”
The dispute with Network Rail is completely separate and concerned with pension rights. Commenting on this Mr Crow said: “Our ballot for industrial action may have brought Network Rail to the negotiating table, but on pensions they have simply sat there with their arms folded,”
“The company belatedly accepted that our pensions are a suitable area for negotiation, but if their offer to set up a pensions forum is to mean anything at all, it must be accompanied by flexibility and a willingness to negotiate.
“The RMT negotiating team has made several positive and flexible offers – including moving this year’s pay anniversary date and forgoing a proportion of this year’s bonuses – in order to keep the final-salary pension scheme open, but the company has refused to listen to them.”
“Today’s directors’ decision to go ahead with awarding themselves telephone-number bonuses for ‘financial efficiency’ will be seen by thousands of loyal NR employees as a grubby reward for pulling the plug on their decent pension scheme,” Mr Crow said.
A spokesman for the Strategic Rail Authority said: “Every time that Bob Crow appears, passengers and taxpayers should be afraid, they should be very afraid.”
George Muir, director general of the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) said the strike action was “bad news” for millions of rail passengers and the country and economy as a whole.
Tim Yeo, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said that the decision will cause “inconvenience and suffering for passengers.”
“This is not the way to solve a dispute. Those who will be affected most by strike action are the long suffering passengers who have to endure one in five trains arriving late and cutbacks in services in some areas.”
The timing of the 24-hour strike looks set to inconvenience commuters on both Tuesday and Wednesday.
