Rail industry is stuck in the past and reform is long overdue – it’s time to make crippling strikes ILLEGAL
WITH a litre of diesel hitting £2, and chaos at our airports, now should be the time to get people back on our railways and secure their future.
Instead, a rail union is bringing 50,000 workers out on strike — largely shutting the railway down for a week from 21 June.
The unions have promised this is the start of a summer of rail strikes unless their demands are met. Yesterday, Unite announced plans for a walkout on the London Underground on June 21, to coincide with the national action.
It won’t just be those who rely on the trains to get to work, sit exams, watch sporting events and concerts or attend hospital appointments who will suffer.
Every one of us relies on the goods and fuel that freight trains deliver. We will all suffer the consequences.
Which is why the law should be changed to ensure that — at all times, including during a strike — there is a requirement to provide at least a minimum service.
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Look at the impact of this short-sighted industrial action. The timing isn’t just bad for the public. It could have an enormous impact on the future of the industry itself.
Stuck in the past
Post-pandemic changes to how we work and travel mean the railways can no longer fund themselves through ticket sales in the same way they did before Covid hit.
Rail has become reliant on £16BILLION of taxpayers’ funding to balance the books.
This is equivalent to £600 for every family in the UK.
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It’s clear that many commuters will continue to work from home. Only six per cent are commuting five days a week.
From doubling passenger numbers in the last 20 years, we’ve lost 20 per cent of them since the pandemic.
There are a number of options.
We can keep on asking the public to bankroll the day-to-day cost of running the railways. That could mean spending less on hospitals and schools.
We could put up ticket prices or reduce the timetable. Both of these options would deter more people from getting back on to the trains.
The final choice is to modernise the railways and make them more efficient, productive and even safer for passengers and workforce alike.
Reform is long overdue. Work practices are stuck in the past. For many of us, we embraced moving to Zoom and Teams so we could continue to engage and work with colleagues “face to face”.
For the rail unions, they would not allow it before a consultation.
Imagine your line manager stopping to say hello when you are on a formal break.
In the office or on site, that’s a positive sign of teamwork. Ludicrously, in the rail industry, the rule book decrees that the break has to restart from the beginning.
Since the pandemic changed the way we work, commuter revenues are at just over half the levels of 2019.
The weekend is now the biggest growth market. But despite running a seven-day service, working on a Sunday is still a voluntary option for staff on the railways.
When England played on a Sunday during the World Cup Finals in 2018, 170 cancellations occurred on Northern Rail alone because they could not get enough staff to volunteer.
At a time when we are trying to grow the leisure market in rail to offset a drop in commuters, Sunday travel is prone to disruption.
But travel patterns are not the only thing to have changed.
Tickets have gone digital and today just 12 per cent are sold over the counter — yet we still have almost the same number of ticket offices as we did three decades ago.
Too often the unions cite safety to reject proposed change. But many of the changes would improve safety for passengers and the workforce.
The rail safety regulator has said lives are being lost by railway men and women doing tasks which are no longer required thanks to advances in technology.
Why do we ask workers to walk along the rails looking for cracks when a sensor under a train can record 70,000 images every minute?
These reforms should help find the money for pay rises for rail workers and remove the need for compulsory redundancies.
Manifesto promise
This is a workforce which has delivered throughout the pandemic and needs a wage increase.
Salary increases over the past decade have lifted the average for rail workers to £44,000. That’s around 70 per cent above the national average of £26,000.
MICK LYNCH, RMT GENERAL SECRETARY
SALARY: The position, which he took in May 2021, comes with a pay and benefits package worth £124,000. At the 2021 AGM, he took a voluntary salary cut to £84,174.
Lynch – a former electrician who left school at 16 and also worked in construction before joining the railways, first with Eurostar – is thought to have earned £763,000 in salary and benefits since joining the RMT in 2015.
UPBRINGING: Grew up on a council estate in Paddington, West London, with four siblings and parents who moved to London during the Blitz as teens.
HOUSE: He now lives in a terraced home in Ealing, West London, worth £1million.
FAMILY: He has three adult children and is married to an NHS nurse.
POLITICS: He once said: “All I want from life is a bit of socialism.”
But they should be able to share the proceeds of these reforms via a new pay deal.
We need everyone who takes pride in our railway to come together and agree a new way forward to secure its future, as well as the jobs that depend on it.
This means the unions, politicians and industry agreeing on reforms which free up money to fund improvements for the workforce and passenger.
Now is not the time for strikes that will make it even harder to resolve these issues.
During the pandemic, a collective effort was made by the Government, industry and workforce to ensure our trains carried on running to get essential workers to hospitals and other workplaces.
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In France, Spain and Italy, there is a legal requirement for between a third and a fifth of train services to continue to run during a strike. This minimum service obligation was promised in the 2019 Conservative manifesto.
If the strikes continue, we will need these new laws to ensure that our fragile railway does not get destroyed.
RMT RULES
- If your boss chats to you during a break you can restart the whole break
- Union would not allow Zoom meetings in the pandemic without a consultation
- Sundays are voluntary. During World Cup 2018 over 170 trains were cancelled