Members of the RMT on London Underground are taking five days of rolling strike action in a dispute over pay and working hours.
Socialist Party members visited picket lines around London on Monday 8 September and heard from strikers how they felt about their hours of work and the lack of any work-life balance, including getting hardly any weekends off work.
Jared Wood, London Transport regional organiser, spoke to BCC Radio London ahead of the strike:
Fundamentally, what our members are saying is that they want a fair share of the success that they have generated on the London Underground.
These are the people that kept the tube running during Covid. And since then we’ve got passenger numbers back to pre-Covid levels. We’ve done that with 2,000 fewer staff overall, and by working around the clock: 1am finishes, 4am starts.
The transport commissioner himself has referred to an extraordinary chapter, where London Underground has generated three years of consecutive financial surplus. Our members are saying that with all of that success delivered, they just deserve to have previous commitments that have been made by London Underground delivered.
And they deserve some recognition of the damage that long-term shift work does, and a little bit more quality time away from the job to recover from that.
Transport for London (TfL) is well aware that our policy is for a 32-hour, four-day week, and we think there’s nothing wrong with workers aspiring to that at this time. But we’re prepared to talk to TfL about any meaningful step towards that objective.
They say there’s no money around, and yet there’s a surplus forecast for this year of £166 million. They’ve just saved £100 million on pension contributions. A tiny fraction of that money would resolve this dispute, and we would go back to generating £50 million a day for the London economy.
Our members keep this system running, and go to extraordinary lengths to do that, day after day after day.
We were ready to keep talking to London Underground all of this week and the weekend, if necessary, to try and resolve this. But we went to see them on Wednesday, and left after just 40 minutes, and then received a letter stating that London Underground has taken its final position, and they are not prepared to entertain discussions around the points that we’re putting.
