Gary Harbord, RMT LU Train Grades secretary, personal capacity
The RMT transport union dispute on London Underground (LU) is entering a new period, with a week’s worth of strike action from 23 July.
Members across all grades will be taking rolling action, in an escalation of the dispute over terms and conditions, job losses and attacks to our pensions.
Coordinate
Aslef, the train operators’ union, has announced coordinated strike action on 26 and 28 July.
At a time when management are being awarded a £12 million bonus by the Labour London mayor Sadiq Khan, LU is unleashing a wholesale attack on all tube workers that will make the job unrecognisable in the future.
Passenger numbers are back to pre-Covid levels and there is no excuse for these detrimental changes. Fleet, stations, trains and engineering are all facing attacks to their terms and conditions, and job losses.
In a separate development, Transport for London is trying to impose an attendance policy that wouldn’t go amiss in Victorian Britain, giving managers a wish-list to harass and bully workers off sick.
Unanimous
A mass meeting of reps voted almost unanimously to escalate the action, and this was agreed by our national executive.
Crucially, this dispute will be member-led. These attacks are due to the £600 million cuts demanded by the Tory government, and pressure will continue to be put upon the mayor to demand that RMT members should not pay for the crisis created by the Tories.
