Brothers and sisters

In 2001, after 3 days of strike action by RMT members to stop privatisation of the underground, the no compulsory redundancies agreement - also known as the “jobs for life deal“ - was reached.

If you open the document attached and go to annex H you will see in plain English that bullet point three on page 17 guarantees that the agreement applies to "all staff employed by lul the infracos and their subsidiaries“ and will pass to new employers. People whose jobs have been made redundant, as can be seen under bullet point four page 17, are to be “used to best advantage” until a suitable alternative job offer is made.

On page 18 of annex H, the very last paragraph entitled 'code of practice' says “LUL can confirm that this code of practice will be contractually binding not only on LUL but on “successive employers.”

LUL are now trying to rip up this deal - which is not only an agreement but which is contractual - by saying that it does not apply to administrative staff and non operational managers. They will put out propaganda saying that your job is safe and that you are being asked to strike for managers. This is completely untrue: we are asking you to defend your agreement and your job, not just the jobs of quite low-paid office staff.

If senior management can ignore the cast iron guarantee in annex H for one group of staff they can ignore it for any group of staff.

• We know already that ticket offices are under threat.
• We know that management are trying to abolish minimum staffing levels for all non section twelve sections.
• We know that £90 million has to be cut from the engineering budget.
• We know that vacancies are being deliberately unfilled cutting jobs by the back door and management have admitted that this is a deliberate policy.
• We know that the technology exists for driverless trains as can be seen on the Docklands Light Railway and this could be rolled out to LUL.
• We know that LUL/TfL are planning £3 billion worth of cuts.

WE KNOW THAT WITHOUT THE JOBS FOR LIFE DEAL THAT NO JOB IS SAFE.

The RMT is asking you to protect your job by defending the jobs for life deal. We have had several meetings over many months with management trying to get them to abide by their own agreement. The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has even said that the jobs for life deal applies to all staff. If we cannot get management to acknowledge their responsibilities to us all under annex H then we may have to take more action to defend the agreement and to defend your job.

We never ask our members to sacrifice their hard earned money lightly but neither can we let your job be sacrificed by a management and a mayor determined who wish to push through compulsory redundancies to pay for the five billion pounds debt run up by the disastrous privatisations of Metronet and Tubelines.

Our motto as a union is “unity is strength”. If we allow them to pick us off one grade at a time we will all be losers in the end. That’s why we must stand together to defend all our jobs.

Yours sincerely

Steve Hedley Regional Organiser